Wednesday, July 01, 2020

Different Strokes

In a normal year I would welcome July today, remind you that training camp begins next month and open the subscription process for BGA Premium.

As much as it pains me to write this, please do NOT open up or renew your subscription yet. Even if there is football team fall, clearly there will be restrictions in place that will require a new model for BGA.
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A regular reader shared a link that steers us to an Inside Higher Ed story wondering how two high-academic schools in the same conference can have such divergent opinions about how to handle things in the fall. Those schools? Bowdoin and Middlebury. (LINK)

If Insider Higher Ed had held off for a day or so it might have been writing instead about the different approaches being taken by two other high-academic schools. Those schools? Dartmouth and Cornell.

While Dartmouth is cutting its on-campus student body in half in the coming year, Cornell is taking the opposite approach. From an Associated Press story under the headline, Cornell says in-person learning is best for public health (LINK):
As colleges around the country grapple with how to reopen in the fall, Cornell University’s president on Tuesday announced that it will welcome students back to campus — an option she said is best not only for their education, but also public health.
The Ivy League university decided that compared with holding classes only online, residential learning would be safer for students and the wider community because it can ask students to participate in a screening program to detect and contain any spread of the coronavirus, President Martha Pollack said.
And this:
Modeling by a Cornell research team determined that two to 10 times more people could be infected with COVID-19 during an online-only semester, with significantly higher numbers becoming seriously ill. That’s because many students planned to return to off-campus housing in Ithaca, New York, where the university is located, and it would have no authority to mandate testing or restrict student behavior if instruction was done remotely.
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RPI and Grinnell are two more high-academic schools added to the list of colleges deciding to forgo the fall sports seasons.
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The venerable Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl charity football game between graduated seniors from Vermont and New Hampshire high schools, until recently an August institution on Dartmouth's Memorial Field, is being called off for the first time since its inception in 1954 because of the pandemic.
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Headline in the Detroit News: Whitmer: MHSAA (Michigan High School Athletic Association) should consider shuffling sports, including football to spring. From the story (LINK):
Close-contact sports in the fall, especially football, along with other such sports as soccer and volleyball -— which is played inside — could be pushed to the spring with the COVID-19 pandemic still in full force and looking like it's going to remain through the fall.
And the governor said …
“I’m also calling on the Michigan High School Athletic Association to consider postponing fall sports that have the impossibility of social distancing that’s a part of them; consider moving those to the spring and running some of the more individualized sports like track and field or tennis or golf to the fall. I anticipate a decision coming from them somewhere around July 20 to 25. That’s what they’ve indicated.”
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Even an opinion piece from a radio station out in Kansas is suggesting the Ivy League's thoughts about possibly moving football to the spring has merit. (LINK)
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Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson has found a new practice partner, one who was introduced to the game at Dartmouth. (LINK)



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EXTRA POINT
How close is our little Vermont village to New Hampshire? The fog this morning is rising from the Connecticut River, the border between what are referred to as the "Twin States." The mountain beyond it is in New Hampshire.

Click photo to enlarge.
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