The Ivy League has canceled all of their fall sports, The Big 10 is about to announce a 5-6 game conference only fall season and AD Ray Tanner now says that 15,000 is a max target for football fans at Willy B this fall with "good social distancing" practices this summer. There are simply too many economic strings attached to cancel the season now. There is a great line in The Godfather when Don Corleone says, "Why don't you tell me, what everyone else already seems to know..." I think that is where we are right now for large crowd gatherings for the remainder of 2020. The only good news is that athletics for the VAST majority of universities is revenue negative, so canceling the season or an entire program is positive for the bottom line.
As many of you know, I work at an institute of higher education and I can safely say that most everything will look very different this fall and that a tremendous amount of energy is being spent by very talented people to design spaces and contingencies to accommodate having students being on campus in real lectures with real professors. I have seen and reviewed those plans and can tell you that as amazing as those plans are, it will take some luck to pull it off. Having said that, I have not seen anything that will allow for large gatherings. Selfishly, my son is an incoming freshman this fall and many, many of the touchstones of the matriculation process have already been lost forever for his class.
As an institution, I am very proud and thankful that we have zero debt on any of our academic facilities and are in the best shape possible to weather this storm. Unfortunately, we really stand alone among the public and I can only assume private colleges and universities around the state and country. If something does not change soon, it will be more than athletics that are closed during this crisis. If you care about your alma mater or higher education in general, consider giving to the SCHOLARSHIP fund because students will be suffering the most. PM me if you have no preference and I will help match your gifts with a like-minded institution with no apologies for the bias of my own. MG
(PS I came here from a two-year school in SC and yes they have a tremendous role to play and not everyone should or needs to go to a four-year school. I also know that you can be successful without a college degree or certificate, hell Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both were dropouts. Also, I have seen Travis Pastrana jump out of an airplane without a parachute but I would not recommend it. Nothing is a better predictor of financial mobility than a formal education.)
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