Ole Miss, SEC Making Plans to Re-open Campus to Athletes This Summer

The COVID-19 outbreak sent student-athletes home, some in the middle of their season. But Ole Miss and the SEC have a date in mind of when they're trying to get athletes back on campus.

The NBA is allowing team practice facilities to re-open in cities where the stay-at-home orders have been eased. 

With Georgia and others having recently eased these regulations and opened some non-essential businesses and others including Mississippi following suit, what does the SEC's plan to allow athletes back on campus look like? 

It's something Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter said on Tuesday that they've spent a lot of time discussing. 

"We've made a lot of decisions at the conference level that have effected all institutions and all athletics departments," Carter said. "We would love to continue to do that, but we also know that just based on the cases and where the states are with COVID-19, some are going to open up sooner than other."

The Southeastern Conference spans 11 states. At some point, you cant just made wide-sweeping declarations to all of the institutions, especially those such as the University of Georgia and others, where stay-at-home orders are either no longer in place or lessened. 

At some point, athletes are going to come back to campuses. Carter has a date in mind of when he wants to make that happen:

"We want to be equitable. But we're talking on our campus about a way to bring student-athletes back to campus this summer. That's important to us," Carter said. "If we want to get the fall started on time, and that's our goal, we have to get these students back and get them back in shape. That July 1st date is the one that's standing out."

Going too far past that July 1 date makes it hard for things to start on time in the fall. Athletes have to get into game shape and – especially for a brand new football staff that didn't have a spring to practice – entire systems still need to be implemented. 

For now, Carter said, there have been no talks to pushing back the opening weekend of football or even relocating the opening weekend game against Baylor out of Houston.

He didn't, however, mention the possibility of downsizing the Ole Miss vs Baylor game from NRG Stadium to a smaller venue within the city. This would obviously only be something discussed if we move into an era where we are playing college football, but doing so temporarily without fans in attendance.   

"This thing is so ever chaining and evolving. It changes every day. So we're just trying to think of all scenarios and trying to get them back. We're going to get them back eventually, we just have to make sure we're doing it the right way. I know our students are ready to get back and our coaches are ready to get their hands on them."

Regardless of where we go from here, there seems to be optimism of a return to some sense of normalcy with states re-opening. Regardless of whether there are fans in the stadium, there seems to be optimism of returning to football in the late summer. 

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