Scooter Hobbs

Admittedly, this may not quite be the cure-all for COVID-19.

It also comes with the disclaimer that this is hardly traditional science at play here, nor strictly approved the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

But an informal Southeastern Conference study into the coronavirus pandemic has found that perhaps the very safest thing one can do to avoid transmitting and/ or contracting the dreaded virus is — wait for it — it is to play football.

Not playing football, apparently, is another matter, being mostly rife with peril and risk and germs flying at you from all angles.

At the least, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said on a teleconference Wednesday, his league, which has had plenty of practice, has found not a single instance in which the COVID thing was transmitted from one player to another during a football game on the field of play.

Maybe we should all — players and civilian alike — beat this thing with impromptu pickup football games played by all in the streets, the parks, the bars and restaurants and any other spare piece of land from sea to shining sea.

It might even be fun.

The alternative?

As Sankey said, “It’s off-thefield, out-of-athletic-department behavior generally” where it starts spreading and the positive tests start popping up.

For football, open dates are the worst. Halloween may have turned out to be the Typhoid Mary of the SEC pandemic.

The key to good health seems to be to stay on the field, block and tackle, run to daylight and don’t play man-to-man in the secondary against Mississippi State.

So what has been the SEC’s reaction to its startling More Football breakthrough?

Well, the conference has now postponed four of its seven games that were scheduled for this week.

Huh? Wait. Wasn’t the gridiron the safe haven for wayward youngsters prone to test positive elsewhere?

OK, we jest. Sort of. Just one more ludicrous example of the absurdity of 2020.

“We always knew this season would be like nothing we’ve seen,” LSU’s Ed Orgeron said, “and the SEC has done a great job.”

This is not criticism of the SEC. Give the conference credit for trying, for adjusting, for realizing it might have to make some of it up as it goes.

That’s the reality in 2020.

The SEC did due diligence, trying to think up contingencies for everything … and then got blindsided by a fairly minor holiday like Halloween, when mask-wearing was encouraged even in the old normal.

Sankey didn’t mention Halloween by name, but there’s circumstantial evidence within the league that, after tiptoeing fairly successfully through the first half of the season, all those goblins are coming home to roost this week because college students will always be college students, with a fair number party animals in the midst.

They chose Halloween because it was there and they could.

The SEC’s cancelation of LSU’s game with Alabama this week, for instance, has been traced (on social media at least) to a few positive tests among the Tigers who went to an off-campus Halloween party that night after returning from a much scarier (48-11) experience at Auburn that afternoon.

Orgeron said he couldn’t confirm that, and maybe it comes under the heading of there being some things a parent, uh, coach, is better off not knowing. He already had video evidence of players mugging it up on the sideline while getting their tails whipped that afternoon.

But it doesn’t take much. It’s not so much the handful of subsequent positive tests as it is the contact tracing that sends many more into quarantine.

So last week during its open date LSU was reduced to using 30-year-old punter Zach Von Rosenberg as its backup quarterback. He even threw a touchdown pass, Orgeron said, as if his secondary needed further belittling.

Whatever, the quarantines finally left LSU shorthanded enough that, no matter how strongly Coach O sticks by his story that he really wants to play Alabama with this team, it’s not going to happen this week.

But my guess is that it will happen eventually. The SEC knew all along the season was going to be a challenge. It had the good foresight to leave an extra open date on Dec. 12 to handle postponements. Now it appears one date might not handle the Halloween carnage.

LSU already had its game with Florida postponed. Now Alabama. It may be 2020 but the Tigers aren’t going to play both on the same day.

But Sankey conceded that getting games played by contenders to legitimize the SEC title game would be a priority. There may be some gerrymandering of the schedule.

“The ability to adjust games, modify the schedule will affect more than just the involved teams,” he said.

So LSU, which switched gears from Alabama to Arkansas preparations this week, could be back working on Bama any minute now.

So come pandemic or high water — who knows? — it’s still 2020 and maybe there’s another hurricane lurking out there. LSU will somehow get in its games against contenders Alabama, Florida and probably Texas A&M. Anything to do with LSU playing Arkansas or Ole Miss might be lagniappe.

But it could all get done. There are different ways, but this seems the simplest:

• Bama comes to Baton Rouge next Saturday; the Tide’s scheduled game with Kentucky next week moves to Dec. 12.

• The LSU-Arkansas game scheduled for next week gets moved to Dec. 19, the day of the SEC championship game (now the spillover date for makeups not involving the division champs).

• LSU plays Texas A&M on Nov. 28, Ole Miss on Dec. 5 and Florida on Dec. 12.

Of course, that’s assuming there are no more postponements.

And who knows what pandemic turkeys Thanksgiving has up its sleeve?

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.comLSU-Alabama

Associated Press