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Random Thoughts: Coronavirus, Basketball and Oklahoma State

NCAA Basketball: Texas Tech at Baylor Raymond Carlin III-USA TODAY Sports

COVID-19:

Baylor athletes returned to campus, and Baylor confirmed that three athletes tested positive for COVID-19. That’s not too surprising, given how widespread the virus is. The Bears, due to privacy interests and HIPPA concerns, are not revealing who tested positive.

Hopefully we can play football in the fall. I’ve mentioned in these recent posts that I am more optimistic we’ll have a football season. The hang-up is that it’s tough to avoid somebody testing positive when so many people play in a close space. How are teams going to react in September if players test positive? Will the opponent agree to play?

I’m not sure how we’ll handle that. Quarantine/lockout fatigue is real. I don’t see any location shutting down again unless the infection fatality rate skyrockets. Maybe that’s the wrong move, but I’m only offering a prediction.

My guess is that we’ll play football. I think there’s too much money, and the demand is too high to cancel the season. But these aren’t easy times to predict.

Basketball:

If you missed it, Baylor Basketball Associate Head Coach, Jerome Tang, tweeted this:

We don’t have anything new to report, but that’s an encouraging tweet about Jared Butler and MaCio Teague returning. If the pair returns, I’d expect Baylor to be ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in the country to open the season.

And I do think we’ll have a basketball season. I’m hopeful about vaccine development in the United States by then. We’re spending a ton of money and have quite a few candidates. And if the virus goes so poorly we can’t have a basketball season, we’re going to be in such a terrible place that I don’t even want to consider it.

Oklahoma State:

I’m sure everybody saw, but if not, Mike Gundy wore an OAN t-shirt. That network is to the right of Fox News, and Chuba Hubbard, Oklahoma State’s star running back wasn’t happy. He tweeted out a response, then Mike Gundy and Hubbard tweeted out a video about the situation, then Gundy tweeted out an apology video.

Everyone has offered takes on that situation, and I’m not going to offer mine here. I’m just going to say that it was weird to have a quick resolution to something. Baseball still hasn’t figured out a return. We’ve reopened a lot, but things aren’t close to normal. It just felt weird to have something get dealt with that quickly in America.