Photo by: Craig Bisacre/Texas A&M Athletics
Takeaways: Ross Bjork Teleconference
Jul 31, 2020 | Football, General
Here's a few takeaways from Ross Bjork's July 31 media teleconference, addressing the SEC's announcement about the football season and more. You can listen to the entire event through the link below.
Full Audio: July 31 Teleconference
Talking College Football...Finally
- "It's hard to believe that we looked down over here at the Bright Center lobby on that Friday afternoon on March 13th, and for the math majors in the house that was 20 weeks ago, which means it's 140 days ago. And it's hard to believe that here we sit on a Friday morning, and it feels like in some ways not much has happened, but a lot has happened, and we have made progress, we have made strides. Yesterday was a big part of that. Really, the bottom line of this is that we're excited to talk about college football, we're excited to talk about college sports. I went out to the walkthrough yesterday with our football team and you could see that these guys are energized. They want to play, and they're focused. Obviously, it wasn't a physical workout, it was a walkthrough but, you can see the focus. You can see the work ethic. That's what we need, we need excitement, and we need to be excited that we do have college sports returning. We know we still have work to do, but we need to be excited about that. I appreciate Commissioner (Greg) Sankey in the leadership that he has provided throughout this to get us to this point. The University presidents, our president, Michael Young, have been terrific through all of this and in our dialogue. And now we can have fun speculating about who we're going to play for those other two games. I have no idea. I haven't seen a chart. You can do a freedom of information request if you want, but I don't possess anything related to who we're playing the last two games to be added. But we're excited to be at this point. Like I said, we still have work to do and get through the next four to six weeks, but we're excited to be at this point."
Arkansas/Texas A&M...But Where?
- "With the SEC Conference games only, obviously the game is where the home team is this year. So, we need that game to be here, at Kyle Field. There's still a few technical things to go through as far as notification, Arkansas, myself and Hunter Yurachek have discussed this throughout the summer and could be a possibility. Beyond that, there's a contract through 2024. Our intent right now is to fulfill that contract, as it's written. I know that Arkansas would look to move the 2021 game to Fayetteville, since the 2020 game is here in College Station. And so we obviously would agree to that, that's fine. But then there's games left on the contract so we would fulfill the contract. But we have no intent of extending the contract beyond the 2024 game that's currently under contract."
Fans in the Stands at Kyle Field
- "The current executive order by Governor Abbott is 50 percent of normal operating limits and that is what we're putting forward. We have a few details to work out relative to our capacity plan. But we're ready to announce that and we're just waiting on a few more things. I hope that sometime next week, we can get that announcement out about our stadium plan."
"Based on our season ticket sales, all season ticket holders who have a ticket as of today would be accommodated in that plan, but we would have to reduce the number of students. Normally we sell about 34,000 student tickets per season, all sports passes, but we would have to reduce that down. But right now, we would be able to accommodate all of our season ticket holders. And as big as Kyle Field is, the capacity is actually more than what the number of seats is with the concourses and the club spaces and the capacity gets to a little bit over 110,000 for spectators, even though we only have 102,733 seats. So our normal operating capacity gets us to a point where we have plenty of room to accommodate season ticket holders, and then we will have to reduce the student number."
League Games Only: The Right Call
- "There's lots of bluster out there about different conferences and this isn't a competition. This is it. This is a public health issue, this is a health and safety matter for our communities, our student athletes and, you know, people talk about gamesmanship and that's not what it's all about. This is about what's in the best public health situation for our communities, and obviously our student athletes who we serve and protect every single day and so really what it boiled down to is, we believe that when our students return to College Station, and every college town in America will see this. We anticipate that the variables will change the numbers of positive cases among students, we're going to see an impact of what that looks like. We hope it's minimal. But we know that's going to happen when young people congregate back here in our college towns, and so we need to try to avoid that. We need to try to stay out of that as much as possible, especially when you're bringing fans to campus. We already have student athletes back on campus but really, protecting their well-being as well, so it really came down to availability. It really came down to the calendar, pushing it back to avoid that, that surge in all of our communities that puts it in late September. And then we do want to play the college football playoff, we do want bowl season in whatever format that looks like and then you just run out of room. And so having 12 weeks to play 10 games made the most sense for our conference so it wasn't about testing protocols, about North Texas or Abilene Christian. They would have met our testing protocols. It was really about that we need to make sure that we protect our communities, the best way possible, early on when students return to campus, and make sure we do that the safest way possible and this is how it was accomplished. Your financial obligations to those non-conference teams, if any, we don't believe we have any financial obligations. This is something that is a public health matter that is outside of our control. And that'll be our position, we will offer all three of the remaining non-conference games and opportunity to play at a different date down the road. So, we have extended those offers and we'll see where that goes. Nothing was accepted but that's our position that this is outside of our control and that this is a public health matter."
What Will the 2020 Schedule Look Like?
- "I would say right now we need to anticipate that it'll look completely different. So, we know what it looks like. As of yesterday, I'm not sure what the rhythm will be. I don't know who we will open up with, I don't know if we'll open up at home or on the road. We really have no idea, literally, we have not seen the models of what that looks like. We only know that we will play the eight games that were already scheduled in what order, and then who the other two are we have no idea. Hopefully soon. We do have a conference call here at 10:30 but I don't anticipate seeing models at 10:30. But we have another call next Tuesday and another next Friday. I think by next week, we'll have a good sense of where we're headed."
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