A U.S. Senator is Out Here Weighing in on Mike Gundy’s Coronavirus Takes

Go back to the Texas Bowl. Do you remember it? OSU got beat by Texas A&M in a mostly-boring game after which Mike Gundy noted that he anticipated Chuba Hubbard would come back to OSU for another year.

Chuba coming back, if it happened — I thought at the time — would be the most stunning thing about 2020.

A little over 100 days later, a U.S. senator is on the social media streets hollering about Mike Gundy’s epidemiological opinions while Gundy tries to steer an entire university based on what he reads on a conspiracy-theory website.

Try going back to the end of 2019 and explaining that sentence to yourself.

But here we are. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut — who has written about how student-athletes are not getting paid the money they deserve — tweeted about Gundy’s coronavirus pandemic opinion earlier this week.

“Mike Gundy argues to ignore the risk that unpaid college athletes will get COVID ‘because we need to run money through the state,'” he wrote. “Sometimes the secret is said out loud: college football isn’t about ‘student-athletes.’ It’s about the money.”

I disagree with the notion that Mike Gundy only thinks college football is about the money, but this is what happens when you roll out a plan for the future of your university but forget to have a plan going into the conference call.

Contrast Gundy’s position with that of UCLA coach Chip Kelly who deferred on the question of returning and didn’t try and play doctor when he was asked about the future.

“Let’s not worry about when we come back or anything like that,” Kelly told the L.A. Times. “… We’ll continue to go in this manner until someone tells us that we’re going to shift. None of us know when that’s going to happen, so let’s not worry about that; let’s just worry about having a really good Thursday.

“The NCAA may weigh in on it, but the governors of the states and the mayors are going to be the ones who tell you whether we can do it because the NCAA can say, ‘Hey, you guys are all going back’ and if [California] Governor [Gavin] Newsom says, ‘We’re not going back’ then we’re not going back.”

“I’ll leave are we going to play up to the experts,” Kelly added. “There’s medical experts who understand this a whole lot better than any football coach ever would.”

And one final note.

Kelly said the Bruins would stay in work mode until someone with the expertise of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told them it was time to play.

“When he says ‘Go,’ ” Kelly said, “we’ll go.” [L.A. Times]

So I think that might be the way it’s supposed to work instead of trying to explain how the testing is going to function and which direction the antibodies are telling us to go.

One thing I’ve heard (a lot!) from a lot of people is that Gundy framed everything with loads of caveats. I’m sorry, but when you’re hollering about One America News Network and laying out a detailed plan like Gundy did, you have to know that your caveats are going to get blown out to sea by your comments. That’s the consequence of speaking recklessly as if you’re in charge when that is very much not the case.

Also (!) the quote everybody is mad about had no “if the medical people approve it …” caveats at all (according to GoPokes).

“This goes back to the NCAA, the presidents of the universities, the conference commissioners, the athletic directors all need to be meeting right now and we need to start coming up with answers,” said Gundy. “In my opinion, if have to bring our players back, test them. They’re in good shape, they’re all 18, 19, 20, 21, 22-years old and healthy. A lot of them can fight it off with their natural body, their antibodies and build up they have…those that are asymptomatic. If that’s true, then we sequester them. And people say that that’s crazy, no it’s not crazy, because we need to continue to budget and run money through the state of Oklahoma.”

Gundy-19 pic.twitter.com/Q57NoznpiX

— Sportstoons (@sportstoons) April 10, 2020

So it’s been the weirdest first 100 days of a year of most of our lifetimes. We all want everything (not just college football) to return to normal, but nobody knows if or when it ever will. Until then, we wait. Hopefully with humility and patience. Hopefully for good news sometime soon.