By Harry Allison
Penn State athletic director Sandy Barbour held a media call yesterday, and she tried to put a happy face on the COVID-19 pandemic:
There will be a 2020 season in some form, she stated.
“I believe it is in everyone’s best interest, when it’s safe and right to do so, that we play a football season,” she said. “We’ve talked about kind of the emotional and the morale piece for communities across the country. Then obviously there’s a revenue and a financial piece to it. So if our return fits into the time frame that we have to do it in a non-traditional part of the year, I think we’ll all look to try to make that happen.”
“That’s just another reason why we’re going to do absolutely everything we can to have a football season in some way, shape or form,” she said. “We’re going to do it. It’s really, really important that it’s clear where we’re taking our advice from, which is from the experts and from a medical perspective.
“When it’s time to do so, when it’s safe to do so, we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it in a big way.”
“We feel that we have a good handle on that, thanks to some expense savings that we will obviously have from not recruiting, from not having events here in the spring and the fact that we have over the course of the last five years built up our reserves,” she said. “We do have – I wouldn’t call it robust – an adequate reserve.
“Then you move into the unknown as it relates to [2020-21]. We’re certainly doing all the analysis so that we’re prepared. We’re doing some scenario planning so that we’re prepared. At this point we’re in decent shape coming out of ‘20.”
