Can Buckeyes go unbeaten in Big Ten? Bank on it

Urban Meyer took one look at Ohio State’s regular-season football schedule and declared it easier than beating Michigan, which is to say the Buckeyes should go 8-0 or 5-0 or however many games their toughest opponent — COVID-19 — allows them to play.

Meyer didn’t phrase it exactly that way — Urb still refuses to say the M-word — but his message was clear enough. The Buckeyes should not lose a game.

Hard to disagree. Ohio State opens Oct. 24 at home against frenemy Nebraska (win) and finishes Dec. 12 against No. 1 enemy UM (win). Between that prelude and conclusion comes a “W” at Penn State — OSU caught a break with not having to face a whiteout in fanless Beaver Stadium — followed by blowouts against Rutgers and Maryland in the back-toback Jim Delany Bowls.

Then it’s www.overbyhalftime. com featuring Indiana, Illinois and Michigan State.

Add a win in the Big Ten championship game, against either Wisconsin or Minnesota, and 9-0 is a snap. I don’t see a trap game in the bunch; no 2018 Purdue or 2017 Iowa. Maybe Michigan State on Dec. 5 in East Lansing gets played in a blizzard, where anything can happen, but even then I would give the Buckeyes a twotouchdown cushion.

Ohio State may not have the firepower of last season, when its halftime leads in nine regular-season conference games averaged 23.2 points. The defense likely will be less stout without Chase Young and Jeff Okudah. But what remains is formidable. Led by quarterback Justin Fields and cornerback Shaun Wade, OSU will turn most fourth quarters into nap time for the starters.

Colleen Kraft, an infectious disease expert at Emory, said it’s “really hard” to see a strategy for the Big Ten to move forward with an eight-game season starting Oct. 24 because of the high case rate on college campuses.

“I think there’s a movement that’s probably happened in the last couple of weeks toward kind of living with COVID,” Kraft said, “but it’s going to be concerning given that other regional (athletic) conferences have not been very successful in keeping their football going.”

Charlotte announced Thursday that its game against North Carolina on Saturday had been canceled due to a depleted roster. Charlotte didn't have enough offensive linemen available to play because of contact tracing after three positive cases on the team.

Kraft, a member of the NCAA’S COVID-19 advisory panel, said it’s become clear that protocols can provide only limited protection for the players.

“It doesn’t apply to what they do in the evening or what they do on their own time,” Kraft said. “And those are the times that are actually the risky times. So while we’ve mitigated the risk from sports itself, we can’t completely mitigate it from coming in from outside of sports.

“I think not having behavior change on campus potentially is going to cause a lot of trouble, even if we can be safe during sports.”

But Jay Wolfson, distinguished service professor of public health at the University of South Florida, said advances in testing and public sentiment justify the Big Ten’s decision to play. Football is being played at South Florida.

“Some of us in public health or medicine are saying it’s dangerous, everybody should be cordoned off, put a bubble around everything,” Wolfson said. “That’s fanciful, and it’s ivory tower (expletive). The reality is people in this country are ready to get back.

“What they’re going to have to realize, though, is it’s going to have to be carefully controlled and paced, and if and when there are blips, you stop, and you have to be able to stop.”

Fans will not be allowed to attend Big Ten games, and Wolfson said that will help mitigate community spread of COVID-19. He also pointed to the success the NBA and NHL have had in containing the transmission of COVID-19.

“The risks are still there,” Wolfson said, “but the facts have changed. We’ve got some new tools. We’ve learned some new lessons. We’ve looked at what other places have done, what other industries have done, and maybe this is a time to say, ‘OK, there’s this compelling psychosocial need to move forward and demonstrate that we’re not being beaten by this thing,’ and sports in many respects are the epitome of our society saying, ‘We can do this.’”

Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said how the Big Ten season fares will depend on infrastructure.

“It’s not a question of if you support or don’t support the decision,” said Adalja, a member of the NCAA’S COVID-19 advisory panel. “Do you have the infrastructure to deal with the consequences of that decision? Do you have the ability to test people? Do you have the ability to sort of insulate what’s going on from that kind of interaction from the rest of the community in a way that doesn’t increase the overall risk to an intolerable degree?

“And much of what had gone on earlier when we were thinking about football, do colleges have the resources to be able to do enough testing to be able to minimize the risk? And there are new technologies that are coming to bear which may have some influence, and we have seen the ways that some of the professional sports leagues have been able to handle sports, and that helps inform that decision.”

The Big Ten has said it plans to test players daily with antigen tests, and Adalja and Kraft indicated those tests could be used reliably.

“There is emerging evidence that antigen tests do preform adequately at distinguishing who is contagious versus who is not,” Adalja said. “There is a generalized push to use antigen tests much more strategically to be able to answer that question, whether an asymptomatic individual is or is not contagious.”