Parr, Burnside on getting extra eligibility, dealing with downtime during crisis
Arkansas softball players senior Sydney Parr and junior Braxton Burnside on the past few weeks during a crisis that has them back at home and Burnside narrowly missing Jonesboro tornado.
Bud Light Seltzer Morning Rush Podcast — Best crowd reactions plus Pete Roulier
Tye & Tommy on the most disappointing football season since 2010, best crowd reactions, plus Pete Roulier!
Pittman probably won’t be making excuses, regardless with practices start
With a rather weird version of spring break now in the rearview mirror, no spring sports all of the attention is going to focus on football, which we don’t even know is going to happen at all this year.
The bottom line is nobody really knows anything for certain.
Coaches are all over the place. Some, like Brian Kelly at Notre Dame, have tried to throw out a drop-dead date of July 1 for college football’s season to start. That’s his opinion.
ESPN’s Kirk Herbsteit said he doesn’t see any football happening this year because there “has” to be a vaccine before they can start that. Again, that’s his opinion and news on the advancement of vaccines and treatments could far ahead of previous predictions.
Don’t expect a lot of clarity from the NCAA, either. This week they went said it was okay to grant another year of eligibility for athletes in spring sports … but they didn’t do much more than just give schools the go-ahead to figure it out for themselves.
A lot of these coaches want to maintain their “edge” and get players back into the “culture.” The guess here is losing all that is more of a concern than anything else.
They may want it, but they may have to deal with what they get.
Arkansas coach Sam Pittman is okay with that.
“We’re not going to harp on that,” Pittman said over a week ago before the school’s official spring break week started. “There’s some concern about all that stuff, but you can’t do anything about it.”
You got the idea he just wants to have any kind of interaction with his players and an actual football. By missing all of spring, he still hasn’t had anything with a ball involved.
Instead of worrying about what it may be, Pittman’s just going to deal with the way it is and make the best of it. He’s done that before.
“I was a head high school coach at three at three different schools and maybe you go back to something like that,” he said. “Everybody will be in the same boat.”
Which is not what some of the coaches want, whether they’ll say it publicly or not. They spent years getting a program built with their own routine and now the whole dang thing is going to be disrupted for several months.
That drives coaches crazy.
Pittman wanted spring practice and time with his players to just find out more about them, how to coach them.
He isn’t going to use a later start as any sort of excuse.
“If they said you couldn’t have anything and just have the regular time you have in August — just Tuesday, Wednesday practice — you’re going to practice about half your season before the first game starts,” he said.
He admitted it might slow down the pace of installing new things like offenses and defenses under new coordinators, but then again when he was coaching high school that’s basically what they did every year.
Older high school coaches will remember the days when they had to spend every preseason practice teaching half the team everything from how to put on a uniform to whether the ball was blown up or stuffed.
Pittman won’t have that issue.
Maybe the closest thing to this is looking at when the NFL had strike years that wiped out big parts of the regular season in 1982 and 1988. Especially 1987 when nine games were wiped off the regular-season slate.
In 1987 there was just one game lost in the regular season, but replacement games with (literally in some cases) walk-on players caused two of the more interesting seasons in pro football history.
The product on the field wasn’t as high of quality those seasons, but it was interesting.
This may be an incredibly interesting year in college football.
Some coaches will complain for at least a year about the problems.
Those are the ones expected to win a lot of games, but didn’t. There will be some of that, regardless when things get restarted in college football.
It’s called an excuse disguised as a reason.
The guess here is Pittman doesn’t plan on using either one of those.
Kjerstad, Opitz on disappointment of early end to season, delay in MLB Draft
Razorback players Casey Opitz and Heston Kjerstad talked with the media Tuesday about how they are each dealing with the shutdown of the baseball season back at home, the draft and disappointment.
Grass is green, maybe best ever, which Van Horn just walks around in these days
Arkansas baseball coach Dave Van Horn talked during a teleconference Tuesday about he he’s dealing with the different things when he should be coaching games during the spring and Baum-Walker Stadium’s field may be best he’s ever seen it.
League cancels spring meetings scheduled for Destin in May
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey announced Tuesday the 2020 SEC Spring Meetings have been canceled due to issues related to the spread of the coronavirus.
The SEC will determine alternate methods for holding meetings important to conference operations and present awards, which is done during the last week of May in Destin, Florida.
“The SEC Spring Meetings represent one of our conference’s great traditions and provide an opportunity to celebrate the past year, plan for the future and focus on our mission to serve people through our universities,” said Sankey in a press release. “We regret this year’s event will not be held as planned, but we know cancellation is appropriate in the light of supporting safety and well-being during this unprecedented public health crisis.”
The SEC Spring Meetings serve to bring together university presidents and chancellors, athletics directors, student-athletes, senior woman administrators, faculty athletics representatives, communications directors, and head coaches in the sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.
The meetings are designed to help shape the rules, regulations and overall strategy for the conference.
“We are currently exploring ways to conduct as many of the planned meetings in an alternate format and time,” Sankey said.
The SEC Spring Meetings have been held in Destin annually since 1985 and previously were held in various locations and in different formats.
Information from the Southeastern Conference is included in this story.
NCAA gives approval to added year of eligibility, but no guidance to schools
The NCAA basically got a lateral from schools on player eligibility due to the current health crisis, shrugged and said they didn’t care, gave ’em the ball back and told ’em to do what they wanted.
The NCAA Division I Council voted Monday for to give spring sports seniors an added year of eligibility 17 days after the committee released a statement agreeing with the idea in theory in the wake of the NCAA canceling all spring championships because of the coronavirus.
Just because of simple financial reasons some schools will be able to deal with it better than others. From a financial standpoint, Power 5 schools won’t have much problem.
This affects just spring sports and not winter sports, most of which had concluded their seasons and the decision to cancel tournaments affected only postseason games.
Seniors will not be required to receive the same amount of aid in 2021 as they received in 2020, instead leaving that up to each individual school. Scholarship limitations were also adjusted and the roster limit in baseball was increased.
That is the only spring sport with a scholarship limitation.
The NCAA Student Assistance Fund to help pay for scholarships in 2020-21, as well.
“The Council’s decision gives individual schools the flexibility to make decisions at a campus level,” said Council chair M. Grace Calhoun, the athletics director at Penn said in a release. “The Board of Governors encouraged conferences and schools to take action in the best interest of student-athletes and their communities, and now schools have the opportunity to do that.”
The Division II and Division III levels of the NCAA, as well as the NAIA and NJCAA, had already approved similar measures but they do not rely on a distribution check from the national organization in their operating budget.
Mid-major schools will be hit the hardest. It would have added about $2.5-3 million to Arkansas’ financial picture and cancelling the spring schedule in all sports probably saved at least that in expenses.
For the Razorbacks, over half of the seasons in baseball, softball, golf, tennis and outdoor track were the sports affected.
Baseball may have the biggest impact in Fayetteville as the Hogs had played just 16 of 56 regular-season games. It is also the sport lately that has had a huge impact on the economy in the area.
