(670 The Score) The biggest challenge that Kevin Warren faced during his tenure as Big Ten commissioner was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which threw the collegiate sports landscape into chaos as it tried to figure out how to proceed amid a health crisis.
On Aug. 11, 2020, Warren and the Big Ten initially announced that the conference wouldn’t conduct its football season, citing health concerns. That decision led to a great deal of scrutiny for Warren, including from then-Ohio State junior quarterback Justin Fields, who started an online petition for the conference to play that season. It received more than 250,000 signatures at the time.
One month later in September 2020, the Big Ten reversed its initial decision and announced that it would conduct an abbreviated season that began in October. That came after Big Ten universities, administrators, players and parents put great pressure on Warren and the conference.
Fields and Ohio State ended up winning the Big Ten and eventually advanced to the national championship game, where the Buckeyes fell to the Alabama Crimson Tide. Despite Fields and Warren having that disagreement, they’ve since repaired the bond – a development that’s crucial given that Fields is now the Bears’ quarterback and Warren has been hired as the organization’s new president/CEO.
So how did Warren go about re-establishing a good relationship with Fields? It wasn’t difficult, he told the Bernstein & Holmes Show on 670 The Score on Tuesday, when he was officially introduced by the Bears.
“The best way you build relationships back like that, especially with type-A individuals, is to be able to let them know why you did what you did,” Warren said. “I think once people had a conversation with me and they recognized why I did what I did, it was because I truly looked at all of our student-athletes (as if) they were a son or daughter of mine. I wanted to make sure that they were safe, and I’m not a doctor. I followed the guidance of our medical personnel. So it wasn’t anything personal. The easy thing for me to do would’ve been to say, ‘Let’s ignore the medical issues and just go and play.’ So I think the more difficult decision was to do what I did, and that was to say until we gather more information, let’s take the safer approach. And then once we gather more information, let’s go back and play. Which we did.”
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