If South Carolina goes to all-virtual classes, how will that affect football plans?
Though the course of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a degree of push and pull when it comes to college football and having students in classrooms on college campuses.
On one side, it seems antithetical to the rhetoric of college sports that if one school is in a state of large-scale shutdown that such an extracurricular activity of sorts keeps going. On the other, a campus without in-person classes offers a closer approximation to a bubble that could allow for a sports season to more realistically be played safely.
The University of South Carolina had a bad week on the coronavirus front last week, but that and any potential of halting in-person class in Columbia might not change life too much for Will Muschamp’s team.
“I don’t know that it would affect us at all as far as that’s concerned,” Muschamp said. “Going to virtual school totally is what you’re talking about. So I don’t know that would affect us at all.”
“A lot of our guys don’t necessarily like the virtual setting. They would rather be in a classroom situation. But again, we had a 3.6 cumulative GPA for our football team this past spring.”
The Columbia campus had 557 active COVID-19 cases, 553 students as of the end of the past week. Five sororities have been quarantined. Meanwhile, Richland County — where USC is located — reported record days for new coronavirus case counts Saturday and Sunday.
USC has held classes for just over a week, and school President Robert Caslen warned that if the numbers trend in the wrong direction, pulling back from in-person classes might prove necessary.
Outbreaks at various colleges have brought in-person classes to a halt, notably North Carolina and N.C. State. The Wolfpack had to move their opener back as a result of pauses in the team’s preseason practices, and other schools such as Notre Dame and Vanderbilt have also had workout delays because of outbreaks.
Elsewhere, Oklahoma had to pause as nearly one whole position group was sidelined by contact tracing, and Texas Tech at one point had 21 players out.
According to Muschamp, South Carolina had no positives in its last round of testing (it will test again Monday) and only one positive the round before that. The athletics department has not released positive test numbers, but players and coaches said earlier in the pandemic that workouts were at times tricky with the number of players out.
The Gamecocks still have four weeks until their season opener, while one college game was played over the weekend. More games are scheduled for next weekend.
“President Caslen has done a really good job through this whole pandemic and managing,” Muschamp said. “Again, there’s no handbook for him either, as far as managing this whole thing on campus and trying to do the best job we can do to get back to some normalcy the safest way for our students and our student-athletes.”
