What SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said about COVID-19 outbreak in SEC, league’s testing policies
By Adam Spencer
Published:
There has been an outbreak of COVID-19 in the SEC this week. Vanderbilt, Florida, Ole Miss and now Alabama have had either players, coaches, or both, test positive for the virus.
A pair of games (Mizzou-Vandy and LSU-Florida) are now postponed, and others might be in jeopardy depending on results of Thursday’s testing round.
On Wednesday evening, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey joined “The Paul Finebaum Show” to speak about the outbreak, saying he didn’t think things could be much worse than last week, but he was wrong:
“Last week, we had a hurricane in the midst of a pandemic and had some teams a little bit thin from a roster standpoint, and we made it through. We got to Friday after all our COVID testing was in. I looked at (SEC deputy commissioner) Charlie Hussey and said ‘Surely next week won’t be any worse than this one.’ Then we took about 5 minutes and said, ‘Oh yeah, it can.’ … We all have work to do to stay healthy and pull off a season in a positive way.”
Sankey also revisited the SEC’s testing protocols. Here’s what he said about what the league is doing currently to try to stem the outbreak:
“We go through testing each week on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday,” he said. “The Thursday test is the one where, until those results are in Friday, you hold your breath. We’re going through our fourth of those cycles. We also know that we’ve had positive tests around the league during the season, then go into contact tracing protocol, our universities and our athletics programs are attentive to distancing, masking, to the hygiene issues. So you limit the impact, it is hoped, beyond those who test positive. So that’s a process that will hopefully take place after a positive test.”
“What it means is, what we’ve set up and our work with our local health departments, has worked in the way it’s supposed to work to maintain health around our programs.”
How many games will we get this weekend? These next couple of days will be important.
Adam is a daily fantasy sports (DFS) and sports betting expert. A 2012 graduate of the University of Missouri, Adam now covers all 16 SEC football teams. He is the director of DFS, evergreen and newsletter content across all Saturday Football brands.
