The SEC will not have safeguards in place to reschedule regular season matchups and the word “no contest” doesn’t appear to be a part of their vocabulary. Greg Sankey was clear about this when he spoke to the media on Monday morning to kick off SEC Media Days in Hoover, Alabama.
“You’re expected to play as scheduled,” Sankey said on Monday. “That means your team needs to be healthy to compete, and if not, that game won’t be rescheduled. And thus, to dispose of the game, the ‘forfeit’ word comes at this point.”
There were hundreds of canceled games across the country last year and the SEC had to reschedule numerous contests, including some with championship ramifications. The conference built in the week before the title game to play these postponed games, but they simply won’t have that flexibility in 2021 with non-conference games entering the fold. Only two games were ultimately canceled in the SEC last season.
It’s clear that this is a push by Sankey and the conference to increase vaccinations for coaches and athletes. At this time, six of the conference’s 14 football teams have reached the 80% mark.
“That number needs to grow and grow rapidly,” Sankey said. We have learned how to manage through a COVID environment, but we do not yet have control of a COVID environment.”
Teams that reach the 85% threshold are no longer required to regularly test their athletes or wear masks in their team facilities. This push is an indication that the conference is trying to take control of this COVID environment. The SEC is doing that by putting the onus on the institutions to be healthy and the expectations are clear.
He reiterated that to Chris Goforth in a sit-down interview on Wednesday by telling him, “The message is to get healthy, be healthy, stay healthy… the potential mechanism of forfeiture is simply an acknowledgment that if you fail to meet those expectations that we have to dispose of the game somehow.”
What sort of impacts will these potential forfeitures have on the championship contenders? That remains to be seen, but the SEC has shown that it can be patient with its decisions so expect this situation to remain fluid.
Ultimately the goal is to avoid what happened to the NC State baseball team when they saw their season come to a crushing end before Game 3 against Vanderbilt in the semi-finals of the College World Series due to positive cases.
“With six weeks to go before kickoff, now is the time to seek that full vaccination.”