Kirk Herbstreit doesn't believe college football or the NFL will be played in 2020
The year is already off to a terrible start in many aspects but it may go down as the worst year in football history if Kirk Herbstreit is accurate.
We are all currently being affected in some aspect following the outbreak of the coronavirus and hoping to return to normal as soon as possible but the way the ESPN college football analyst sees it, this fall may be much the same.
In fact, Herbstreit recently shared his firm belief that there will be no college football or NFL played this fall, as first shared by TMZ Sports.
“In my opinion, until we have a vaccine, where we’ve really got some control over this, even if this curve is flattened out, this virus is still out there. I’ll be shocked, I haven’t talked with anybody but I’ll be shocked if we have NFL football this fall, if we have college football. I’ll be so surprised if that happens,” Herbstreit recently said during an appearance on ESPN radio.
The ESPN analyst further explained his opinion is based on the fact we likely won’t have a vaccine for the coronavirus for some time. When you take that into consideration, it may be tough for football to continue until that time arrives.
“Just because from what I understand, people that I listen to, you’re 12 to 18 months from a vaccine,” Herbstreit continued. “I don’t know how you let these guys go into locker rooms and let stadiums be filled up and how you can play ball. I just don’t know how you can do it with the optics of it.”
Who’s ready to fast forward to 2021 already?
I agree with the Herb.
Yeah me too
Sadly, I believe Herbstreit is correct.
Herb? shhisssh. The scientists at the Center for Disease Control don’t know what to expect but he’s has a hunch on this. Thanks for nothing. If you take the data from the earliest communities, it looks hopeful but then again it Chinese information. AND we have almost no significant data about mutated form with there very well could be by now.
Recent research from Italy, if I remember the location correctly, is the genome of the virus is very stable meaning mutations aren’t likely. So a vaccine, when available, will last.
I read that as well. Slow mutation = Good.
I hope your information is better than mine, because there is supported data that says the opposite. One substantial change is the rate of severe, critical, and deadly effects in age group 50-60 and 40 to 50. There is also a report claiming people who had tested positive early in the pandemic have now tested positive again for a mutant Corona Virus. I’m waiting to see if this story get affirmed or not.
The gravity of this, compared to the horrors of the mutations in previous out-breaks, underscores the importance of not allowing
China to continue the “wet-market” breeding grounds” of these killers.
Our species has stayed ahead of viruses for perhaps a million years. But when virus opportunities are promoted far beyond what nature would allow, there is a real possibility that a super-virus could mutate into a form that wipes out it’s new species jumping host completely. Not to mention that our population density today is a new opportunity for a mutation to happen and recycle, happen and recycle, etc.
” Missouri fans are just… Awful.” ∆∆∆
So you make up stories about Missouri football and Viruses….
This is one article from USA Today posted 9hrs ago…
”While researchers caution they’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, the tiny differences between the virus strains suggest shelter-in-place orders are working in some areas and that no one strain of the virus is more deadly than another. They also say it does not appear the strains will grow more lethal as they evolve.
“The virus mutates so slowly that the virus strains are fundamentally very similar to each other,” said Charles Chiu, a professor of medicine and infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.”
Ignoring information doesn’t make it go away, neither does ‘considering’ make come true. The following will just get you started on one class of virus. (History and Recent Advances in Corona Virus Discovery, P.I.D. Journal) (CDC’s, Human Corona Virus Types, brief summary and relationships to animals, evolution from sources.) (J.S.Kahn and K.MacIntosh, History and recent advances in Corona Virus discovery, and 60 related sources). It’s also helpful to have some practical experience handling, identifying, culturing samples.
Laughing at b.t., here’s a scientific compilation, USA Today, with fundamental disclaimer, “(based) on the tip of the iceberg”. Wow, that’s a confidence maker, isn’t it.
The fundamental nature of this is that agents are harmless until they
change in that one critical way. All virus organisms, by their nature, mutate. Small samples of these mutations are the most likely to appear harmless, so why don’t they stay harmless. It’s math and the ‘law of (extremely) large numbers’. We can’t escape life with virus and bacteria assault, but just hoping they don’t do any worse is what? Not everybody in AL or MS thinks they know something after reading the dumbed-down version, just the simple minded.
Go actually read the article and the numerous other articles on the mutation of the virus…
I would take a 4th graders opinion on the virus over anything that comes from between your ears….
you are absolutely right BT.
Viruses don’t have genomes. Therefore they can’t mutate. They aren’t a living thing. There is still so much unknown about them that crap we hear in the media can’t be trusted.
This is false. They have genomes and they can and do mutate, usually more rapidly than other genomes.
The games can be played without fans. That may be our best hope. I think we have a real good chance of that happening.
I was actually hoping Alabama’s defense was going to practice less social distancing on the field this year but oh well.
This made me laugh. Nice one.
Doubt it, teams need at minimum 100+ including 70 players, training staff and coaches…would be impossible for them to practice and/or travel together till this is under control.
Not really. People are still flying and most teams would just charter. The issue would be if a player or staff member contracts the virus.
That would be a big problem.. That team would probably end up forfeiting the rest of the season after exposure…
If a player is known to have played in a game, they are going to want to quarantine his team and the opponent he played against. It could get very ugly trying to play a season under those conditions.
Herbie also told us Les Miles was going to go from LSU to Michigan as HC. With this, he’s probably correct. Sadly he’s batting .500.
Don’t think i’ll get my pandemic hunches from this guy.
I sure hope he is wrong on this. Wasn’t it during WW2 the last time college football season was cancelled?
I think he’s wrong. At some point, the country has to start getting back to normal. At this rate, homelessness and depression will claim more lives than the virus ever would have.
I hope we do have a football season but I just do t see one this year. We haven’t come close to the worst parts of the Coronavirus and for football to begin in 6 months seems impossible at this point.
It may be an ugly season with little to no practice at all, but I think they will still play it. Maybe even a shortened season.
Like you said, at some point they will have to open the country back up or we will be looking at an economic recession that we may no recover from for a very long time…
Do you remember H1N1? The US had over 60 million cases and around 13 thousand deaths… How did we respond to that?
This is serious for sure but the response seems somewhat extreme.
Is your point that this more extreme response is reasonable because the current disease is several times more deadly?
Also, even slight differences in the rate at which people require medical attention and hospitalization (a rate that is typically closely linked to the infection rate) can have an enormous impact on the mortality and health of many people. We should be even more skeptical of our personal feelings than we are of experts and data.
COVID kills at about 1.5%. So if there are 60 million cases in the US, that’s 900k deaths. That’s kind of a lot.
We don’t actually know what the mortality rate is for COVID-19. So many guesses without enough data. And the trend right now is that the estimate keeps lowering the more data we get. It could even be at 0.1% by the time we get enough data.
Very true gator but I don’t believe the mortality rate will be that high once this is all said and done.. All in all I hope everyone remains as safe as they can and this passes…
The ratio that means the most at the end of the pandemic is number of deaths to number of recovered individuals. TODAY that number is 27,352 to 133,355. That’s 2.7 in 13.3 (3 in 12 would be a 25% mortality rate). That number can’t be argued with or changed. The 436,024 people that still have the virus might all recover or might all pass over (Heaven forbid). The exception is that another virus or mutation also takes hold during this pandemic.
It’s too early to know if football happens in 2020 or not. Social distancing and staying home slows the death rate but stretches the pandemic further into the future. I spoke to a friend from the England today who said one of there auto making factories is now making only respirators, and this is just one example.
I hope he’s wrong but I can see that happening.
I can’t believe we’ve played football all these years with the incredible risk of influenza
The ‘Rona is just a liiiiitle bit different than the Flu.
At this point people likening coronavirus to the flu are willfully ignorant
I kinda agree with Herb. Even if the pandemic slows down, they haven’t practiced, conditioned or worked out together and there may not be enough time to safely prepare for a fall season
Someone suggested playing last year’s season again on tv just like it was this year’s season. Being a LSU fan I have no problem with that! If any season deserves to be highlighted a second time around it was 2019 (at least from a LSU and SEC perspective). The comment section would take on a whole new flavor.
If they replay the season I am going to make a killing in Vegas.
It’s all a conjecture-game right now…Not knowing when this thing will end is the most difficult part to comprehend, as not a single person really knows. Frankly, I believe that “”Life As WE Know It” will return…rather rapidly once this is over…normalcy will return to our daily lives & work lives also.
To me, the best potential outcome is that the 2020 College Football Season will play a shortened season(at least that seems more plausible than canning the entire season). Teams will get in shape & practice and continue on, as the college football season progresses. The How & When are the Big Questions….and as long as there are Zero Answers, we really are all just guessing. But…Hope Springs Eternal…Always.
Would it be possible to play football in the spring?
What a lot of people do not realize is that the virus is expected to get less intense over the summer. But in the Fall, it is expected to become much more active again. Similar to other viruses.
So that is probably why he is concerned about football this Fall.
The virus will likely reach its maximum spread for this flu season by mid-June. Whether that’s a million infected or 10 million infected depends on the doubling rate in days, which is a function of social distancing and testing. But either way, things should be back to normal by August.
There could be a “second wave” of the virus around October-November, but whether that happens or not, there will be tremendous socio-economic pressure to restart all business and cultural activities about three months from now.
Note that this optimism about football starting on schedule in August does not in any way mean that April and May of 2020 are not going to be very, very bad. We will likely have at least 10,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19 by the end of May; and possibly as many as 100,000. If these numbers sound crazy, it’s useful to remember that common strains of influenza infect about 50 million Americans each year and kill 12,000 to 60,000.
Hoping you are wrong. This was to be the season the Falcons went back to the Super Bowl and WON—(we have Gurley now)
Yeah, everybody’s invincible and undefeated before the season kicks off. Blah. Blah. Blah. The Falcons blew their chance to step into the history books. Love Julio but the team is mediocre at best.
Have you looked at Louisiana. 4.3% CFR (case fatality rate), 30% hospitalization rate, 10% vent rate. You ain’t playing football without LSU. Now you say, who cares about LSU. I present Georgia. 3.2% CFR, 28% hospitalization rate. You say, I don’t care about Georgia. I say the issues in Georgia and Louisiana are due to the south having high levels of chronic health problems. Look at NY CFR 0.9%, hospitalization rate 12%. And those aren’t GOOD those are just less horrible. Bottom line, this is bad, and it’s likely to be worse in places with chronic health issues who are not taking it seriously. I saw a church in Louisiana the other day with 1000 people. In Arkansas at least 13 people spread disease at church. And no, I’m not singling anyone out. In NY, the Westchester spread in New Rochelle was started at a synagogue. Bottom line, if people take this seriously, we might get back to normal life faster. If they don’t we probably won’t. I don’t see packed stadiums happening. I predict if there are seasons they are played for TV only.
You could be right about stadium attendance. But the math of virus spread says this thing will reach maximum spread for this flu season and start to decline by mid-June. This isn’t optimism or pessimism; it’s just the math of R0 (the spread coefficient; around 2) and likely declines in the doubling rate (of the number of cases, from 3-5 days now). This does not in any way minimize the fact that we will likely have between 10,000 and 25,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 by mid-June.
Excellent points! Spot on!
And we have 49k dead every year from flu and 14k dead from swine flu in 2009. This just in…life is dangerous.
No, this is much worse. The annual influenza death numbers are reached with normal social interaction, unrestricted travel and public events, considerable population immunity and business as usual.
The apples to apples deaths with COVID-19 would be 10 times higher: the same environmental and cultural conditions that result in 49,000 influenza deaths would result in 490,000 COVID-19 deaths… and the numbers would be even higher still for COVID-19 because we have no herd immunity for COVID-19.
All that said, the disease should peak for this flue season by mid-June.
I never said a word about your god coronavirus. Where in my two lines did I say anything that could be debated? You are a tool.
You implied, pretty clearly, that the coronavirus pandemic is not a big deal in relation to annual flu deaths. Its lethality is different by one order of magnitude.
No…you INFERRED. I do believe coronavirus is a nasty bug. My point is that people die and life is dangerous. We die from all types of things. I’m more concerned about the reaction to coronavirus than I am about coronavirus. 9 million people a year die from hunger worldwide…how many people you think will die of hunger this year when the economy is in shambles? You pick and choose stuff to worry about.
Well, that’s a more measured and reasonable answer. But yes, we do pick and choose which things to worry about. If the COVID-19 pandemic was not addressed aggressively, at a five-day doubling rate and 1.2% average mortality, it would likely spread to 60% of the U.S. population by mid-June and kill 2.3 million Americans. As it is, it could still kill 200,000 as a result of delayed response and stupidity, but I think there’s a very good chance to keep deaths under 30,000 with aggressive testing and social distancing.
Hunger and food insecurity are significant global problems, but the number of Americans who will starve to death this year, while probably not zero, is likely close to zero. There isn’t even a statistical category for it in U.S. cause of death statistics.
Wadeless, tragedies can exist simultaneously. Just because there are some unresolved problems doesn’t mean we should be focused on others. Hunger has nothing to do with COVID-19 and you’re essentially virtue signalling by even bringing that up. Nashville is spot on in his comments and you were absolutely dismissing COVID-19 through your comments, backpedaling not withstanding. You’re the only tool here, pal.
In all of my days, I’ve never been accused online of virtue signaling. Laughable. Go kneel at the foot of coronavirus and when you come out of your house you won’t have anything left to enjoy.
No he’s not a tool. The thing you fail to see is stopping excessive death spiral from not addressing Covid-19, won’t stop food insecurity (which likely no one actually starves to death in the US as a real percentage of American deaths, I’m sure it’s like 0.00000000001%) or suicides or flu deaths or diabetes or cancer or car accidents or lightning strikes or whatever. I mean other than Covid-19 killing some of those people they all still have a chance of also dying from all the other things. Covid-19 just increases their odds of death in the next few months from a Healthcare system collapse. I don’t really understand the obsession with pointing out that more people die from this or that. Yep, and you can still die from all those things too.
The reason why NY’s numbers are lower is there have been nearly 50000 confirmed cases in NY. They are further along in the epidemic and have more confirmed cases in low risk groups. Generally speaking, the death rate falls as a disease progresses through a community. Having said that, this disease looks to at least double the mortality rate of an unvaccinated flu. The main issue is overloading the healthcare system, which leads to more people dying who could have possibly been saved. The fast spread of this disease and lack of specialized treatment combined with the media panic is what is making this disease so dangerous. The media and public response is proving almost as harmful as the disease itself.
The mortality for COVID-19 is about 10 times higher; at least 1% of reported cases for COVID-19 nationally versus about 0.1% of reported cases for influenza. Pockets of much higher mortality for COVID-19 (4-10%) are due to unique local demographics and circumstances (e.g., larger concentrations of elderly residents).
I think the mortality rate has to do with lifestyle factors. This virus unfortunately attacks the sick. Search CDC (centers for disease control) and CVD by county USA. Now do it for COPD, now do it for diabetes, now do it for hypertension, now do it for obesity, now do it for smoking. Now overlay all those maps. Now look at your (potential) hot zones for mortality based on the mortality rate of underlying conditions and comorbidities for Covid-19 (which are in the 5-10% range for all of the above). Once you do that you will see why the south, Oklahoma, Texas and some other rural states are potential powder kegs for this and why Georgia and Louisiana are (likely) doing so poorly compared to NYC. testing wise, upstate NY has as little testing as the south but our hospitalization rate is only 9%. However, most of our counties have admitted they stopped testing due to lack of test kits. Only our county DOH’s point out that our infection rates are likely significantly higher than reported. Not sure if other DOH around the country are emphasizing lack of testing doesn’t mean no Covid-19, it just means no confirmation.
The fear factory will prove Herby right. How this country ever stormed the beaches at Normandy is beyond me.
Nope. There will be a football season starting in August.
There is a very, very real chance that more Americans die from Coronavirus than died in WWII. Minimize this at your own risk.
To state this more clearly, WWII claimed 405,000 American lives in 4 years.
The more conservative estimates I’m reading estimate approximately 500,000 lives lost to COVID-19 in 1 year. How you can compare this to “Normandy” where a tiny, tiny fraction of the Americans who will perish from Coronavirus died, and come to the conclustion that we are soft, or panicky, is just something that would have to be entirely based on falsehood and delusion.
But did Americans in WW2 rush out and buy up all the toilet paper in the first first five minutes after Pearl Harbor? To say we are not “panicky” is the most delusional thing I’ve ever read.
The panic buying is a typical human reaction and not unique to any country. It happens on a regular basis as hurricanes are approaching a coastline and in the locale of every natural disaster.
There actually was considerable panic and fear after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese would invade the West Coast of the mainland U.S.
Wadeless you’re the only delusional one here.
“How this country ever stormed the beaches at Normandy is beyond me.” A stupid over-reaction if ever there was one.
I believe he’s right. Let’s just hope a vaccine can be developed in time. I don’t think the NCAA can cancel Football without them completely collapsing. Sadly they may have to though. Then what?
I gotta say this though, what if the XFL returned in the fall if there was no NFL or CFB. Think about it, the XFL players play without many fans at all so it wouldn’t mightily effect them to not have fans and even though it’s not really good football, at least it’s football. Agree or disagree?
I wish people would stop guessing, playing doctor or scientist, making headlines where there just simply isn’t enough to go on at this point.
Heck, even the scientist are trying to figure it out. The virus could end up dissipating with the summer months. Perhaps the malaria vaccine/zinc/z-pak trifecta does the job as tests in France and Italy have been showing in controlled tests.
The H1N1 swine flu infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion in 2009, over 240,000 deaths worldwide per the CDC, yet football went on along with everything else. 1,000 Americans were dead before an emergency was even declared….granted, the media was fine with that then…It subsided and we haven’t had another pandemic because of H1N1 since.
It’s spreading like wildfire in Louisiana. It’s mid 80s to 90. I know it gets hotter there, but the rest of the country that’s a hot mid summer week. I don’t think it dies in the heat. The ease of transmission probably negates that.
Whenever this virus-thing is over & done…..It’s Gonna Be Great to put on your game day wear & go to the stadium and hear something like Roll Tide ! Go LSU ! Go Gators ! Go Dawgs ! Go Vols ! *Or whatever other team in the SEC you cheer for ! **No disrespect intended for any team…O.K.
Then we all can post concerning something that’s close to our hearts…SEC Football !
Being as I am asa much of a medical expert as KH I think there will be football in the fall. From what I understand life will return to normal in a few weeks.
tonytiger….I hope you are 400% correct on this one. I’m ready for SEC Football now. The cases in China have dramatically dropped, after this virus ran it’s course there. The rest of the world is ready to see the numbers decline.
SEC Football ! SEC Football ! SEC Football !
A month ago we were told this was a hoax and it was contained – airtight! Some hoax!
Y’all watch some docs about the 1918 Flu that killed millions? Sadly we don’t have anyone in our collective memory still alive.Not interested in arguing right now, wishing all you to “Live Long and Prosper” (and yes, we have to accept normal life on pause, subject to change.)
this prediction isn’t aging well currently, we’ll see how it looks after 6-7 weeks into the season.