Bob Bowlsby: ‘Not realistic’ to think teams won’t test positive

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From Inside the Red Raiders

Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told the Austin American-Statesman Thursday that it was unrealistic to believe that any team would get through the season without having positive tests. Bowlsby’s comments came shortly after Texas’ announcement that 13 Longhorns tested positive or presumed positive for COVID-19.

“We feel like we’re getting great information,” Bowlsby said. “But to think that anybody is going to go through the year without positive tests, it’s just not realistic.”

Baylor athletic director Mack Rhoades told David Smoak that he wouldn’t be surprised if there were cancellations.

“This upcoming year is not going to be normal, so get that out of your mind,” Rhoades said. “The way things have happened in the past will not be the way things happen this upcoming year.”

Bowlsby said one of the changes would come in how players held to their teams’ discipline.

“The kids are right now, they’re at the facility only for a couple of hours a day,” Bowlsby said. “The rest of the time, they’re with friends or they’re out eating and probably going to parties and the like.

“I think that’s probably the biggest challenge we’ll have during the course of the season,” Bowlsby said. “The kind of year that a team has is going to have a lot to do with the level of self-discipline and their ability to always apply best practices.”

“I think there is a number of different aspects to it. The psychology of public assembly I think is going to be an interesting thing to watch,” Bowlsby said. “Are people really going to want to go into stadiums and sit cheek-by-jowl with people they don’t know after what our society has gone through? The level of confidence in public assembly is relatively low right now. So even if you can come up with a system that allows it, how exactly do you go about encouraging people to go into stadiums again. And if you have to have social distancing as others have said, that means you take an 80,000-seat stadium and it becomes a 20,000-seat stadium. Who gets in? Who has priority? How does the entry and exit take place? How do you manage the lines at the restroom? How do you manage the lines at the concession stands? As difficult as it is to disinfect a locker room or a weight room, can you imagine the Herculean task of disinfecting an entire stadium?

“It’s got some components that just as a matter of scale are very difficult,” Bowlsby said. “And this is all brand new; it’s unprecedented. And I think over the long haul, this will affect locker room design and it’ll affect weight room design and it may involve amendments to safety equipment, helmets and wearing screens over your face.

“And there will be a new normal,” Bowlsby said. “We don’t know exactly what that new normal will entail, but we have to be ready to evolve. Because change is here and we aren’t going back where we were before. It’s going to be a new day.”

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