Yurachek weighs in on state of college football

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Despite growing momentum in other conferences to cancel or postpone the 2020 college football season, it sounds as though the SEC is continuing to move forward.

In an interview on the Paul Finebaum Show, Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek revealed Monday afternoon that the Razorbacks have no active cases or players in quarantine on the football team.

To him, that is a sign the SEC’s plan to keep athletes safe is working so far and a reason not to hit the panic button just yet.

“We’re ready to get started with practice next Monday,” Yurachek said. “That can continue to change, but our student-athletes - Coach (Sam) Pittman and I meet with them on a regular basis - they want to play.”

Not only is Yurachek the athletics director at Arkansas, but he is also the father of a current player - Jake, a walk-on linebacker - and one of the Razorbacks' graduate assistants, Ryan.

"I do have a son on the team, I have another son who started high school football practice last week, I have a son who’s a graduate assistant," Yurachek said. "My wife and I both feel comfortable with them participating based on what we know."

This comes on the heels of reports that the Big Ten will officially announce Tuesday that it won’t play college football this fall. Many expect the Pac-12 to follow suit, while the Big 12 is on the fence and the other two Power Five conferences - the ACC and SEC - still seem set on playing.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey released a statement Monday afternoon via Twitter that said the conference planned to be patient in making such a decision. “Can we play? I don’t know. We haven’t stopped trying,” he wrote.

His statement was necessitated by a wild weekend in which multiple reports surfaced that the Big Ten was close to canceling the season and was asking the other Power Five conferences to join it in a unified announcement.

“We’re not going to panic because another Power Five conference maybe makes a different decision,” Yurachek said. “In the Southeastern Conference, Greg Sankey does an incredible job leading us and part of his leadership the past several months is for us to be patient and take time in making decisions. These are some really impactful decisions we’re having to make and there’s no need to rush into making those decisions.”

Instead of being well received by the rest of the country, the Big Ten’s request was met with resistance even within its own membership. Nebraska’s Scott Frost, Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, Ohio State’s Ryan Day and Penn State’s James Franklin have each publicly voiced their support of playing.

Frost even threatened that the Cornhuskers would attempt to play even if the Big Ten cancels the season. Some Ohio State players have suggested playing in the SEC this season.

In another development during the past 24 hours, several of college football’s biggest stars - including Heisman frontrunners Trevor Lawrence from Clemson and Justin Fields from Ohio State - have started a #WeWantToPlay movement on social media.

Around midnight ET, Lawrence shared a graphic that asked for further safety protocols and protections amid the COVID-19 pandemic while also calling for the creation of “a college football players association.” Each of the Power Five conferences are represented in the graphic and it has been shared by numerous players, including Arkansas star running back Rakeem Boyd.

Early Monday morning, Yurachek became the first athletics director in the country to publicly support the movement when he sent a Tweet using the #WeWantToPlay hashtag. Sam Pittman followed about an hour later, becoming the first head coach to do so.

“I think they have found during the past several months that they have a voice and they’re coming together with that voice,” Yurachek said. “Not only to tell their AD on their local campus what their thoughts are, but to have that voice heard nationally and I think in the right way.”

In the hours since Yurachek’s tweet, athletics directors at Alabama, Texas A&M, Missouri and Ole Miss, as well as the chancellor at Tennessee, have voiced their support of a college football season.

As of Monday afternoon, only 14 of 130 FBS schools have officially pulled the plug on a fall season. UConn, in its first season as an independent, was the first to do so last week, followed by the 12-team Mid-American Conference over the weekend and Old Dominion out of Conference USA on Monday.

“College football has survived a number of things during the past 150 years and I truly believe that college football, in some shape, way or form, can also survive what we’re going through right now,” Yurachek said. “It may survive without all of the teams in the Power Five or FBS participating this year, but college football will survive.”