A torrent of public criticism has been leveled at Kevin Warren in the wake of the decision to suspend the season. Whether it was a majority of supporters, or just the hardest, it was an easy target: an inexperienced university football commissioner who presided over the closure of one of the most visible bastions of the Midwestern tradition. No football season has meant that rival games, such as the Little Brown Jug (Michigan vs. Minnesota) and the Old Oaken Bucket (Indiana vs. Purdue), which have been played for a century or more, are canceled.
In fact, of course, Warren did not cancel anything – he did not have that authority. But the presidents kept the details of their vote confidential, probably because no one wanted to stand on the record against football. As a result, speculation persisted that Warren had made a unilateral decision. It also did not escape that his son, Powers Warren, played a wide receiver in Mississippi State, a university in the Southeastern Conference that would soon begin its season. ‘Isn’t it ironic,’ said Clay Travis, Fox Sports ‘radio personality,’ that the son of the Big Ten commissioner has an opportunity to decide whether he wants to play college football or not, and that it’s a decision is what is not, ‘as he put it, given to Big Ten athletes to perform their fall sports.
The fans and columnists were coaches, players and parents. At a video conference the day after the decision was announced, Ohio head football coach Ryan Day struggled to control his emotion. As with other programs in the country, Day and his athletes spent long hours preparing for a season in difficult conditions, and they paid close attention to a Covid-19 protocol that included showering in their rooms and to avoid all unnecessary social contact. Suddenly, that season was swept away among them. “You don’t just wake up the next morning and everything is fine,” Day said. “It’s not good. It’s devastating. Fields, the Ohio State quarterback, has filed an online petition calling for the conference’s 2020 schedule to be reinstated immediately. By the next day, it had 250,000 signatures. Eight football players in Nebraska have filed a lawsuit against the Big Ten, criticizing the process by which the season was postponed as ‘erroneous and ambiguous’. A group calling itself the Big 10 Parents United wrote an open letter to Warren expressing a total lack of confidence in his leadership. Warren’s response to the criticism emphasizes that the president’s conference voted and that the result ‘overwhelmingly supports the postponement of autumn sports’. The vote, he insisted, would not be re-examined.
On the last day of August, Timothy Pataki, an assistant to President Trump, called Warren on his cell phone. The president wanted to talk to him the next morning, Pataki told him. There was little doubt about what he wanted to say. “Shame on Big Ten not playing football,” Trump tweeted two days earlier. “Let them play.” After Pataki’s call, Warren prepares for his conversation with the president. “Keep an open mind,” said his wife, Greta.
Trump’s motivation was easy to decipher. The chances were high that the forthcoming election in the Big Ten heartland would be decided; Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, each having at least one conference member, were all considered swing states. If Trump could persuade the Big Ten to play a football season, or even appear to do so, his election prospects would likely benefit. He said not a word about the Pac-12, who also decided to postpone the season. But California, Oregon and Washington, where the conference is centered, are blue.
On the morning of September 1, when the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in America passed six million, the White House called Warren and put Trump at stake. The conversation lasted 15 minutes. Trump has offered to provide the necessary assistance to resurrect the Big Ten season. Warren replied that he would be in touch if he needed anything. “On the one yard line!” Trump tweeted later that morning.
They were not so close. But despite Warren’s insistence that the decision be final, the conference’s position actually began to shift. In the days following the vote that halted the season, Warren created a Return to Competition task force, which includes subcommittees dedicated to medical issues, scheduling and television. This has brought presidents like Samuel Stanley of the state of Michigan, a specialist in infectious diseases, to the same conversations with athletic directors and doctors. (Looking back, Warren admits, it was probably something he had to do months in advance.) The task force was meant to help lead the conference to a decision to finally play the 2020 football season – perhaps in January or spring, when the championships of most other intercollegiate sports, those offered by the NCAA, would be contested.