Ohio State football: Diving into the specifics of the Big Ten coming back

Ohio State will have a shot to play for a national championship in 2020. In order to do so, there will be many hurdles that have to be climbed.

The Big Ten announced their decision to return to football starting the weekend of October 23-24. This doesn’t absolve them from making the wrong decision to begin with in postponing the season, but they are at least back. A lot needs to happen to keep them back as well.

First off, there will be a 9 game schedule for every team. There will be a normal 8 game schedule up until the week of the Big Ten Championship. On that week, the normal championship will occur, while also allowing the second-place team in each division to play each other, third-place teams playing each other, and so on.

A specific schedule for each team will be released at some point later this week. The week of the Big Ten Championship will be December 19. That leaves no buffer time for a team to quarantine if that is needed. Which leads me to those protocols…

If a player tests positive for COVID, they won’t be able to return to competition for at least 21 days. That is a significant amount of time. Essentially, they would miss 1/3 of the season. A team must also keep a positivity rate below 5% in order to maintain playing.

That number will be based on a rolling seven day period as well. Daily testing will begin on September 30th too. Each player will also undergo cardiac testing as well to make sure that they remain healthy after a positive COVID test.

This stringent protocol underscores the importance of keeping players safe and making sure that they don’t become infected. If a key player gets infected, say Justin Fields, that would significantly affect Ohio State since he would be out a minimum of three weeks.

Ohio State and the other universities will have to be very stern to make sure that their athletes don’t make poor decisions that could possibly lead to them contracting the virus.