OPINION: SEC Should've Scheduled an All-Team Bye Midseason to Accommodate for COVID-19 Issues

There's just no way Greg Sankey and the Southeastern Conference leaders didn't see some sort of scenario like this playing out. They could have been more prepared.

There's just no way Greg Sankey and the Southeastern Conference leaders didn't see some sort of scenario like this playing out. 

Two games this week within the SEC – Vanderbilt vs. Missouri and Florida vs. LSU – have been postponed due to the spread of COVID-19 within the Vanderbilt and Florida programs. 

On Wednesday, Alabama head coach Nick Saban and athletic director Greg Byrne announced that they had both tested positive for COVID-19 and are isolating at home. 

That same day Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin made it known that the Rebels are dealing with their own set of COVID-19 issues, but that they "could play today" if needed.

COVID-19, while prevalent on ever campus, seems to have finally infiltrated locker rooms across the conference. So how weren't they more prepared for this?

The SEC put into place some requirements on whether or not teams can play games despite COVID-19 issues within the program. A team must have 53 scholarship players, including seven offensive linemen, one quarterback and four defensive linemen. However, teams below the threshold can opt to play anyway if they get league approval. According to Kiffin on Wednesday, Ole Miss has met all four requirements.

For now, the Vanderbilt vs. Missouri game will be played on Dec. 12, a bye week that the conference put in before the championship game for such issues. The Florida and LSU game doesn't yet have an official rescheduling, but will likely also be that same date. 

But why didn't the conference just put a universal bye week in the middle of the schedule to help additionally mitigate these issues that they must of seen as a real possibility?

The SEC, which was one of the earlier conferences to return to play, had more than enough time to do such a thing. All teams have a bye week in addition to that Dec. 12 open week. They're not like the Big Ten and Pac-12 will likely find themselves running into even more significant issues, as they're playing eight and seven game seasons without any bye weeks at all. 

(It's a little ironic here that the conferences most concerned about 'player safety amongst the COVID-19 outbreak' are now the ones putting players in the most harm to squeeze in a season, but that's a different column.)

There's a very good chance the SEC will now run into an issue where some teams may not get their full ten games in. If LSU, Florida, Vanderbilt or Missouri have to postpone another game, there's simply not a week to play it. 

This could have all been mitigated by a mid-season, universal bye week among all teams. The SEC had the time on the calendar to do so, and simply chose not to. 

It's not like players and coaches would be opposed to such an idea – they'd just have more time to recover and game plan. Sure, maybe television executives wouldn't love it, but they're certainly going to hate it even more if they have to cancel games altogether.

Maybe mid-season isn't the proper terminology for such a bye. If I were setting the schedule, I would have put that bye after every team has played six games. If a rescheduling needed to occur from the first six weeks, it goes into that post-week-six bye. Anything from the final three games, or ones that couldn't be squeezed into the first universal bye week, goes in that post-week-ten bye. It's not that hard.

Commissioner Sankey has gotten a lot of praise over past months for his handling of COVID-19 and the SEC's return to play protocols. Some of it is warranted, but in effect all the commissioner did was to do nothing and delay. It was the right call, but really they just didn't do anything.

When it came to scheduling, they should've accommodated for this extra week. 

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