Ohio State's Ryan Day: Canceling the football season right now 'would be a mistake'
The coach said it would be a 'mistake' to put the season off
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Ohio State football coach Ryan Day said Monday he doesn’t think the season needs to be canceled as rumors swirled about the Big Ten Conference putting fall sports on hold due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Day said he thinks it would be a “mistake” to cancel the season.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Well, it certainly caught me off guard with the schedule out last week and the schedule was designed to have some flexibility,” he said on ESPN's "College Football Live." “And I just think that our job is to create the safest environment possible for these young men. And then present it to them and allow the players and their parents and their coaches to then decide if it’s safe enough. But because this schedule has provided some flexibility, I think we need to certainly not cancel the season."
He continued: “And there are two different opportunities: September 26th and the first week of October, there are opportunities to start the season then and that’s the way the schedule was designed. I think to do that right now (cancel the season) would be a mistake and I think we need to take some time to re-evaluate some of these issues.”
Day added that the rumors of the Big Ten Conference meeting and voting to cancel the season after releasing a football schedule last week caught him off guard. When asked what he thought changed over the course of the last week, Day said the testing aspect hasn’t totally been figured out.
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“Well, there are still issues with the season that we know and some of it is still figuring out how the virus affects young men and the contact tracing,” he said. “There are still things that we need to work through in terms of playing other teams and testing and those types of things. But by pushing back the season, we can still figure out some of those issues. And whether we can play the season or not, that’s up to the players and the parents and the coaches, in my opinion. But we have to figure out what the safest environment possible is, and then present it to them. And for them to at least not get presented exactly what those things are, I think would be a mistake.”
Day had tweeted earlier Monday that he was going to fight for the players to have a season.
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Ohio State is tentatively scheduled to play Illinois Sept. 3.