The Buckeyes gearing up for the Ohio State-Rutgers game on Nov. 7 Ohio State won 49-27. Credit: Mackenzie Shanklin | Photo Editor
As Ohio State’s chances to play against Illinois have vanished, the focus has shifted to preventing a community spread throughout the team.
Ohio State announced Friday that the Buckeyes’ road matchup with Illinois had been canceled and that the football program would be pausing team activities for the time being. Head coach Ryan Day — who contracted the virus this week — said it has been a difficult week for the program.
“It’s been a very, very emotional and difficult week for everybody in the program,” Day said Saturday in a press conference. “You think about Thanksgiving and being away from our families, and then this increase that we’ve had this week in positivities.”
Ohio State Head Team Physician James Borchers said that the program began to experience an abnormal rise in cases on Wednesday. However, the Buckeyes continued to practice until Friday with different precautions in place.
As cases continued to rise in the program, Day said the team began to practice without body-on-body contact and that the practices largely resembled walkthroughs. The team was also required to wear masks at practice, and staff and team meetings were moved to a virtual setting.
“For Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we didn’t put helmets on, we didn’t go body-against-body, we kinda went against trash cans,” Day said. “We didn’t practice, physically, it was a practice on paper but we weren’t running and sweating and all those things because we had to keep our masks on the entire time.”
The decision to pause activities and cancel the game against Illinois was made by Ohio State and not a result of requirements set in place by the Big Ten. The thresholds established by the Big Ten include two components — both of which need to be exceeded for a team to be forced to pause team activities.
The population positivity rate, which compares positive-tested individuals to the at-risk population, did exceed the 7.5-percent threshold established by the Big Ten.
However, the test positivity rate, which takes into account the number of positives against the total number of tests administered over a seven-day rolling average, did not exceed the 5-percent threshold established by the conference, so Ohio State would have had the opportunity to play Saturday.
Despite the opportunity to play, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said playing the game was not the right thing to do.
“The thresholds that the Big Ten has in place, that the medical sub-committee has put in place, I don’t think any team in our league has actually hit those,” Smith said. “We’re making a decision, not just on the thresholds, but making a decision based upon what we see.”
With Saturday’s game being canceled, Ohio State’s opportunity to win a fourth-straight Big Ten title is in jeopardy.
Ohio State needs to play a maximum of six games prior to the Big Ten title game Dec. 19. Unless the Big Ten alters its six game minimum or the average number of games played across the conference drops below six, the Buckeyes would need to play in each of their last two games in order to be eligible for the conference championship.
The Buckeyes are scheduled to travel to take on Michigan State next Saturday, but the journey back to the field is uncertain, Smith said.
Smith said they will continue to take each day by day, and Borchers said the data has and will influence decisions.
“The approval process is us. It’s not like we’ve got to get approval from the Big Ten or anyone else, it’s us,” Smith said. “What we have to do is watch our culture and environment, certainly have to watch to see that we don’t have continued spike in the positivity rate.”
From a football perspective, Day said the team would be able to play as long as they had a practice Thursday and a walkthrough Friday.
Following his positive test announced Friday, Day will be away from the team next Saturday regardless if they are able to suit up or not.
But the separation from the team did not stop the coach from preaching a message of positivity in a time of adversity.
“I told the team it’s just another opportunity to get through some adversity and work through adversity and learn more about yourselves,” Day said. “Nothing about this is good, but I guess it’s just going to make us tougher, it’s going to make us stronger, it’s going to make our young men better husbands, better fathers. And I really believe going through all this is going to make us all stronger, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy.”
