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College football’s leadership ranks were caught off guard by the extended persistence of the COVID-19 outbreak, which eventually led to the Mountain West canceling its 2020 season on Monday (and the Big Ten and Pac-12 officially following suit the next day). On Tuesday, UNLV athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois pledged that it won’t happen again.
In a press conference alongside UNLV football coach Marcus Arroyo and other fall coaches and athletes, Reed-Francois expressed her confidence in the Mountain West being able to rally and figure out a way to hold its football season in the spring.
The key, she said, will be preparation.
“That’s what we’re going to do,” Reed-Francois said. “We’re going to prepare. Our winter sports will prepare, our fall sports will prepare for the spring.”
It is unclear how the Mountain West will go about conquering the logistical challenges of moving an entire sport — and in football’s case, the most important sport, financially — to another season.
With seven months to formulate a plan, Reed-Francois is firmly putting her faith in the conference leaders to come up with a workable blueprint for spring football.
“I think if we put our mind to anything we can make it happen,” Reed-Francois said. “Will it be challenging? Absolutely. We have to continue that adjust-and-advance mindset. We’re going to figure out because this is really important.”
In the meantime, there are still many questions to answer regarding the fall season. For now, the UNLV football team is still on campus and in fact practiced on Tuesday morning. Arroyo said the team will continue to work out as usual and try to maintain a normal schedule despite the absence of games.
Off the field, Arroyo and his staff will continue recruiting as usual.
“All we can do is keep doing what we’ve been doing,” Arroyo said. “Right now recruiting season is open, we’re hunting. We’re on the move. There hasn’t been anything that has slowed us down.”
Reed-Francois confirmed that fall athletes’ scholarships will carry over to the spring “100 percent,” and that all academic resources will continue to be made available to keep them on track to graduate.
Reed-Francois said it’s still too early to understand the financial impact of canceling the 2020 fall sports season, but the university believes it will be able to weather the storm without eliminating any sports programs, as other schools have done.
As for winter sports, Reed-Francois said it’s too soon to offer up any concrete plans. UNLV basketball sent its players home from summer workouts last weekend, and it now appears unlikely that the season will begin in early November as currently scheduled.
Reed-Francois said predicting that far ahead during the COVID-19 outbreak is a fool’s errand.
“Right now we’ve been in this global pandemic for 150-plus days of uncertainty,” she said. “Things change so incredibly rapidly that I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in two months. What I can tell you is that we will be prepared.”
Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.
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