It’s finally game week. Ohio State will tee it up against Nebraska this Saturday at Ohio Stadium, but it’s going to be a real different experience. There will be no crowd, no band, and many other changes will be in force to protect players and coaches from the Covid virus.
Gene Smith and several key administrators met with media members today via Zoom. Below are some bullet points on some of the changes that we will be seeing this year.
–Fans are not allowed on campus game day even to tailgate. You will be asked to leave if you go to campus. If you do not leave you will be charged with trespassing.
–Fans are discouraged from large “watch” parties. Small groups are encouraged with masks and proper distancing.
–Players and coaches families are allotted a total of 650 tickets. Visitors coaches and families get about 400. Aside from the teams and essential workers, that will be the entire crowd.
–For Gene Smith the toughest part of getting the first game played was getting league approval. Then working out the schedule. Everything else seemed easy after that.
—There are rules governing the piped in crowd noise. Certain decibel levels cannot be exceeded and piped in crowd noise cannot interfere with the play on the field.
–Rules on attendance may relax as the season progresses. If so, the next group to be invited to games will be the band.
–Parents and players will not have the traditional meet and greet after the game.
–OSU will stay at a hotel the night before home games but it will not be the Blackwell. They will be at a place where they will have the entire hotel to themselves .
–The team will travel to away games by air and will travel the day before the game. The one possible exception is MSU. They may bus to that game but then would fly home.
Allen: not every school in the B10 has a 100,000+ capacity stadium, true, but every one has enough room for the approximately 1,000 people allowed to attend with plenty of room left over for a 200 person band. Northwestern and Minnesota have the smallest stadiums at about a 50,000 person capacity, so the current attendance limit puts them at 2% of capacity. My guess is you could shoehorn in another 200 band members, raising the figure to a mind boggling 2.4% of capacity and still be able to maintain adequate social distancing. I bet if they got creative enough they could even fit in bands for both schools.
The Big 10 is flubbing this just like they did the postponement of the season. For a group of presumably intelligent academicians, they have demonstrated a complete lack of common sense. But, at least we can be happy that we can play as you stated. Of course, high schools have been playing for 6 weeks in much of B10 territory, and many with much more reasonable attendance policies than the largest universities in their area.
Nice job, Allen. I wholeheartedly agree.
Put me down as totally disgusted by the idiotic ban on the Ohio State Band’s performance. Just for the sake of argument and the truth there is probably no group of 200 persons in the entire country better able so maintain required social distancing better than the Ohio State University Marching Band! Get Real! Are you kidding me? Gene Smith, you are a pathetic.
The band and cheerleaders should be allowed for every game. There is more than enough room in south stands for them.
Just a control tactic by the BIG. Their way of saving face is by taking these draconian crowd measures…
How about just taking things at face value rather than tagging it with some stupid political slant?
Seems obvious to me that starting small and working your way up to having more people is the smart way to go about it (for every school). Not every school has a 100K+ stadium, thus their bands might be closer together than at Ohio Stadium.
How about just being happy that we have football to watch this weekend? Or at the very least, how about not thinking every decision was made to piss you off and instead is actually made to try to protect people.