Football Without Other Fall Sports? Joe C. Discusses the Options, and the Optics

OU is formulating a plan today for fall sports outside of football, but Sooner AD says information is "hard to come by, and it's been uneven"

First and foremost, Oklahoma does not have a plan for its fall sports — outside of football — just yet.

The Sooners sponsor four Olympic sports in the fall: women’s soccer, women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s cross country.

NCAA president Mark Emmert on Thursday night issued a cancellation of NCAA-sponsored championships (tournaments) in those sports, plus men’s water polo, men’s soccer and women’s field hockey.

So, teams can play their season. Conferences can stage their postseason tournaments. But no national tournaments, no NCAA championships, Emmert said.

Although it was easy to see coming, the announcement itself — Emmert doing a video on the NCAA’s social media channels — nonetheless blindsided athletic departments nationwide.

“We found out about the same time you did, or everybody did — and quite candidly, our student-athletes did,” Castiglione said. “Everybody heard about it through social media.”

Castiglione said Friday morning during a video conference call with media that he and his coaching staff and administrators would meet later in the day on Friday to discuss all the scenarios: Do the Sooners play games, likely on a severely reduced schedule? Do they stage some kind of modified offseason practice? Do they set their sights on the possibility of playing a longer, fuller season in the spring when the NCAA says it wants to have its championships?

More on that later. But first, the heart of the matter: what would the cynics say if schools played college football, but put off women’s soccer, women’s volleyball, cross country, et al?

They’d say they knew it all along, that amateur college sports is a farce, that football is all that matters, that it’s all one big money grab.

“If it’s safe enough to play football,” they’d ask, “then why is it not safe enough to play soccer?”

Castiglione explained Friday that he’s not concerned about the optics of such a scenario because, frankly, it’s a little more complex than that.

“Our path to safe play includes any of the sports that would have a season, or when they would have a season,” he said. “Now, if there are mitigating circumstances to having a season this fall, such as the fact that a championship has been taken away, or there are so few games that might occur, or student-athletes might be looking at the ruling of the NCAA regarding eligibility and trying to determine whether or not they want to play. Those are mitigating circumstances.”

For example, in soccer alone, some schools have already offered a significantly reduced season — six games, one SEC school presented its athletes. What’s the point of that?

And if the athletes and coaches don’t want to do that, does everyone get a redshirt? Is everyone eligible to return in the fall of 2021? What are the actual prospects of being able to stage a season in the spring? That schedule, too, would likely be reduced in volume (fall schedules call for about 20-22 regular season soccer games, for instance); would athletes be on board with that knowing the risk of Coronavirus and additional shutdowns may not be diminished in February — and here we go again?

Either way, Castiglione further clarified the question of student-athlete safety.

“If we decide — and I’m not saying we will — but if there’s some decision to move, say, volleyball to the spring because the championship is now going to be held in the spring, that’s not being moved for the reason that it wasn’t safe to play this fall,” Castiglione said. “It’s that the championship may be held in the spring.

“But we have to realize that there still may be the possibility that there wouldn’t be a championship held in the spring. So we can move any of those sports as we want for those reasons, but there may not be a guarantee that we get to the spring and there’s a championship.

“Again, it’s not comfortable for me to sit here without all the details and give you an honest, straight, well informed answer since I don’t have all that information. But based on what we’re trying to figure out ourselves, that’s just a basic snapshot of some of our conversations.”

Castiglione said various scenarios and options are being discussed.

“Last night and early this morning, we’ve been talking amongst ourselves, visiting with our coaches,” he said. “They’re not necessarily surprised (by the NCAA decision), because we saw more and more of the conferences either cancel seasons altogether or at least announce attempts to move it to the spring. So we got to a point where the NCAA was challenged to have championships anyway by virtue of their own policy, meaning, it dropped below the available number of teams (50 percent) to warrant an NCAA championship. But the decision to possibly put it in the spring might cause us to rethink playing this fall.

“The other factor that has to be considered in the decision-making process are the decisions around eligibility. Our student-athletes want to know, what kind of effect is this going to have on their eligibility? And rightfully so.”

Castiglione said everything was being discussed both on the OU campus and among other Big 12 ADs.

“I want to compliment not just Oklahoma student-athletes, but candidly, the student-athletes across the country,” he said. “This has been a highly emotional and difficult path for them to live day-to-day, wondering if they’re having a season, when it’s gonna start, how many games they’re going to play.

“They’ve been so good and so smart and asked such great questions internally. I’m just gonna guess colleagues of mine are having the same experience. You just have so much care, concern, but you just get impressed by the way they’ve handled themselves and the way they’re asking the kind of questions. And we want to be able to give them the answers as soon as we know something.

“The only challenging part of it is information has been hard to come by, and it’s been uneven, and it’s not always been timely. We’ve had to explain that to ‘em, that we don’t have the answer, we just can’t give it to ‘em until we have more information to provide them and help make sure that they’ve got the information so they can make well informed decisions on their own.”

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