BACK ON THE FIELD
Questions remain as Lobos return, plan for home games without fans this fall
The quick and surprising return of Lobo football in the fall of 2020 comes with a guarded OK from the Governor’s Office.
Immediately after the Mountain West Conference and University of New Mexico athletic director Eddie Nuñez held separate virtual news conferences Friday to announce the Lobos and the Mountain West Conference are headed back to the gridiron, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office said it has agreed to allow the program the opportunity to play at home as long as strict guidelines are met.
The state’s response to COVID-19 has prohibited any type of organized team sports since the pandemic hit in mid-March. The New Mexico United professional soccer team resumed its season in July but has played every match on the road because of the state’s health restrictions.
“The governor’s administration has been in regular contact with UNM all this week in anticipation of the decision announced by Mountain West leaders [Thursday] and has compiled a thorough set of COVID Safe Practices and restrictions for intercollegiate athletics,” the Governor’s Office said in a statement. “UNM — and any Division I intercollegiate athletic program in the state — will have to meet in order to proceed with larger practices and games in accordance with the MWC’s plans for an eight-game season.”
Those guidelines include no fans at home games, a decision Nuñez said he can live with. He said his primary focus for the first six months of the pandemic was giving his student-athletes a chance to safely compete. The focus for the next few weeks will be meeting the governor’s requirements to get the Lobos back onto the field.
“As much as I’d love to have our fans there, I need to get the steps that we got to go through first to get to that point,” Nuñez said. “When the time comes, we’ll be ready to go.”
Lujan Grisham is demanding strict and regular testing protocols, mask requirements for everyone on the sidelines, capacity limits for indoor practices, quarantine requirements for visiting teams and a code-of-conduct document everyone on the team must sign.
“The state wants to find a way to permit these schools the opportunity to ‘opt-in’ to a safe fall season, but health and safety must be the top priority, for the state and for the collegiate institutions,” the governor’s statement said.
“As much as I’d love to have our fans there, I need to get the steps that we got to go through first. … When the time comes, we’ll be ready to go.” Eddie Nuñez, UNM athletic director
The Mountain West announced its return from a COVID-19 shutdown on Thursday night, saying that most of its 12 football programs will play an eightgame slate beginning Oct. 24 with the conference championship scheduled for Dec. 19.
Thompson acknowledged a number of elements — including the schedule and whether each team will actually be able to play — are unknown. He said it is ultimately up to the individual schools and their local governments to allow teams back on the field.
Mountain West Conference Commissioner Craig Thompson dismissed the notion the conference caved in to align itself with power leagues like the Big Ten and Pac-12, which each reversed course the last 10 days and decided to play abbreviated fall schedules. Both Thompson and Nuñez claimed the turning point had everything to do with the availability of reliable, rapid-return testing.
The league has partnered with Quest Diagnostics to administer three rapid antigen tests per week to every player and staff member. The protocol would begin the week of the Oct. 24 opener and continue for the duration of the season, meaning everyone on each team will be tested at least 24 times.
“It really started to turn, probably, in the last couple of days for us,” Thompson said. “I think some of my peers have said that [the testing] was really the game-changer.”
Thompson didn’t say how much each individual test would cost but said the Mountain West will absorb the entire expense — “It will be well into the millions of dollars,” he said — with money taken from the league’s cash reserves.
The goal is to have each team create a bubble of about 140 players, coaches and staff and have them routinely subjected to examinations.
At the center of it all is the Mountain West’s lucrative new TV rights agreement with Fox and CBS Sports, a deal that when fully enacted could bring as much as $4.5 million to each school. An eight-game schedule allows the league to meet the programming needs outlined in the agreement but also points to another issue — the potential of outbreaks that could threaten the entire season.
Thompson said any game canceled would not be made up.
“We have eight games in eight weeks, and I would fully anticipate that not all 12 institutions in the Mountain West will play eight games for various reasons, just based on what we’ve seen in the first three weeks of this season,” he said.
Determining a conference champion will be a challenge if the virus causes disruptions. The NCAA is expected to formally approve a measure that eliminates minimum bowl requirements, and Thompson said ESPN, which owns broadcast rights to the majority of the lower-level bowl games, told him the postseason will be adjusted to have games start as early as Dec. 1 and run right up to the national championship weekend in early January.
He added the league is working on several models that will be disrupted slightly by Air Force wanting a six-game Mountain West schedule to accommodate its obligation to play Army and Navy. Boise State’s desire to play a nonconference game against Brigham Young would limit its Mountain West slate to seven games.
Nuñez said one version of the schedule has the Lobos playing their original slate of 2020 games with five of them against division rivals Colorado State, Air Force, Boise State, Wyoming and Utah State, and the others against Nevada, San Jose State and Hawaii.
He added that without the governor’s blessing to host games at University Stadium, the idea of the Lobos playing every game on the road would have put undue financial stress on an athletic department already dealing with significant lost revenues during the pandemic.
Nuñez said he is prepared to have UNM’s first two or three games played on the road in hopes of back-loading the schedule with home dates, but beyond that it’s a risk.
“If it gets past that, then the financial situation is real and I’m not going to sit here and say we’re going to find means and ways to make this happen because it is going to be extremely challenging,” he said. “For us to be able to offset some of those costs we would needs fans, we would need some of those other things to help offset those costs. All that’s part of the equation. We’ll continue to work it through.”