The SEC is one of the three Power Five conferences around the college football world still attempting to play a season this fall. In fact, the Alabama Crimson Tide are slated to take on the Missouri Tigers on Sept. 26.
All of this could now be in question following a major COVID-19 outbreak on the Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa.
“Just in the last few days as we’ve tested at Coleman Coliseum and the Student Health Center, we’ve seen the numbers jump up from 1 percent to 4 percent to 5 percent,” University of Alabama vice president for Student Life Myron Pope said in a meeting this week, via AL.com. “And in one particular case, I think it was Coleman Coliseum (Thursday), actually it might be the Student Health Center, we saw 29 percent of the students who tested were positive.”
In response to this, Alabama’s administration has announced a moratorium on in-person student events for 14 days. On-campus classes began for the semester just three days ago. Given how quick the virus has spun out of control, that 29% positive test rate is alarming.
It was just this past weekend that Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne called students out for failing to socially distance while entering a bar.
There’s really just one more domino that needs to fall in order for the entirety of the 2020 college football season to be canceled. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have already canceled their seasons. This leaves the SEC, Big 12 and ACC as the only Power Five conferences slated to start the season next month.
If one of those conferences were to join the Big Ten and Pac-12, that’d likely be all she wrote for college football this fall.