A month ago, not only was the Big Ten dead in the water, many around college sports anticipated it was only a matter of time before the SEC, ACC and Big 12 joined them.

Instead, after several successful weeks of training camp and now multiple weeks of college football on the field — and one week of NFL action on the gridiron, the Big Ten is back in the game.

So what changed that made the Big Ten reverse course?

Ohio State head team physician Dr. Jim Borchers, who also serves as co-chair of the Big Ten’s Return to Competition Task Force medical subcommittee, explained things from the medical side on Wednesday:

“I think there are some critical areas that we really sought best evidence in and expertise in. Our ability to test consistently and uniformly amongst the conference and provide that was really important, and I think we have been very comfortable with the idea that we’ll be able to provide daily rapid testing,” Borchers says in the clip below. “That will give us great surveillance of our student-athletes and those individuals involved in those competitions — coaches and staff, and be able to respond to that with confirmatory molecular testing and PCR testing, so that we can quickly remove individuals that may be at risk of infecting someone else.

“And I think as we worked with our task force, infectious disease specialist epidemiologist and looked at this process that quite frankly others have described as well. And as we looked at the various testing options we became more and more convinced that there was a path forward, and we became very convinced that using a data driven approach where we’ll monitor data, not only regionally, statewide, in our local communities and university communities, but amongst our teams specifically, and using specific metrics to our team, such as the test positivity rate of the team.”

The full clip from Dr. Borchers was shared online by the Big Ten Network: