LEXINGTON, Ky. — Time for the opening acts to step aside and let the headliners take over.
SEC football starts Saturday with seven conference games. It’s the start of an all-in, all-SEC schedule of 10 games for each team over 11 weeks. It’s a fan’s dream and a coach’s nightmare for America’s best football conference.
“Some of that football you see in other leagues you are not going to see Saturday,” Kentucky coach Mark Stoops said Monday. “We play 10 SEC games and I can promise you you’re not going to see that stuff where there is green grass all over the place, easy throws and guys running wide open. We’re not going to see that.”
Just a guess, but Stoops may have been sampling last Saturday’s Louisville-Miami ACC shootout in which some blown U of L defensive assignments led to ridiculously easy 75-yard Miami touchdowns on back-to-back-plays. Just a guess, but we assume he wasn’t alluding to three years ago when the Wildcats’ failure to cover Florida receivers handed the visiting Gators a 28-27 win.
To be fair, Stoops appeared a bit on edge Monday. Surely the daunting challenge of playing at eighth-ranked Auburn on Saturday had a little something to do with his mood. But maybe so did the elephant in the room.
That would be COVID-19. After all, the first few weeks of this unusual college football season have been plagued by pandemic postponements and cancellations. Positive COVID-19 tests. Contact tracing. You know the drill. College football has now become youth sports where on the morning of the big game, your child’s coach receives a call from the opposing coach saying there’s a bug going around and there’s not enough healthy players to play.
Last Saturday, both the Charlotte-North Carolina and Baylor-Houston games were canceled within 72 hours of kickoff. There were reports Kansas State may not have enough healthy bodies to play Oklahoma on Saturday. After his team’s 52-0 win over USF last Saturday, Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly told his team “we can’t afford to lose guys each and every week.” Alas, the Irish’s game against Wake Forest this Saturday has been postponed because of positive COVID-19 tests.
So, yes, after taking the prudent step of delaying the start of its season to Sept. 26, the SEC pushes the start button Saturday. But how confident is Stoops that the league can make it to the finish line?
“It is what it is,” said the coach. “We are going to control what we can control. We’re going to get ready for this meeting today and get ready to go play Auburn and play one heck of a football game. Can’t worry about the rest of it. I have no idea. There are probably medical experts who can give a much better answer than I can.”
To that end, the SEC announced Tuesday it is providing teams with “cutting-edge wearable proximity devices” to enhance contact tracing efforts during the season. The SafeTags, produced by KINEXON, are worn as a wristband or on a lanyard and are the same devices currently being used by the NFL. And if you’ve noticed, the NFL has completed the first two weeks of its season without a single disruption. The SEC hopes for the same.
Meanwhile, you can’t finish without starting. “Good to be in game week,” Stoops said Monday. “Seems like it’s been a long time coming, but it’s an exciting time for us, that’s for sure.”
It’s exciting for college football. Face it, the SEC still rules. The conference had 348 players on opening day NFL rosters, 84 more than the runner-up Big Ten (264), followed by the ACC (208), Pac-12 (195) and Big 12 (133).
“It’s brutal, brutally hard,” Stoops said. “Again, I sit and watch other folks and just shake my head in amazement at how difficult and well prepared each and every team we play is. That’s the challenge.”
