Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh doesn’t believe his team’s season is finished.
Regardless of the Wolverines canceling Saturday’s game against Ohio State – the subsequent straight game they’ve needed to cancel due to a COVID-19 flare-up – Harbaugh is confident the team can play Dec. 19 in its crossover game against a Big Ten West adversary.
Above all, Michigan must curb its present outbreak. While the school has not reported the quantity of positive tests in the team, athletic director Warde Manuel said Tuesday during a video news conference that cases have kept on ascending since it previously declared an outbreak Nov. 30.
“Stemming the COVID positives has been the objective here the last week,” Harbaugh said during the news conference with reporters. “Still trying to get that under control, and hopefully that’ll be looking better in the next few days. Ultimately, we were told the number of people that were out due to COVID was too high,” Harbaugh said. “So, there’s the real possibility that we could play again before this season is over.
“Our players, as I said before, they want to play. They wanted to play this week. They want to play next week. They’re going to continue to condition and prepare for that possibility.”
Darryl Conway, Michigan chief health and welfare officer, said the team has not entered the “red-red” zone set up by the Big Ten, which forces a team to close down all activities when the total test positivity rate surpasses 5% and the populace rate surpasses 7.5%. However, Michigan’s medical staff didn’t clear the group to continue practices Tuesday, which would have been a vital advance in potentially playing Saturday.
“The situation we found ourselves in, we knew there be obstacles,” Harbaugh said. “And the situation we’re in today is that the players, to a man, wanted to play this game.
“This is a daily process, and we follow the daily decisions that are made. We proceed with what’s in the best interest of the health and safety of our players and our staff. Tomorrow, there’ll be more information; there’ll be more decisions made and we’ll continue to follow those decisions, what’s in the best interest of the health and safety of our players.”
In the interim, the Big Ten’s schedule one week from now stays in flux. In the event that Ohio State (5-0) can’t locate another adversary this week, it won’t meet the six-game threshold should have been qualified for the Big Ten championship. In any case, conference commissioner Kevin Warren said Tuesday that he will talk with “stakeholders” within the conference to examine the current necessities to be qualified for the title game.
One week from now, Big Ten teams are scheduled to play a crossover game against an enemy from the opposite division, however Manuel was gotten some information about the chance of rescheduling the Michigan-Ohio State game to Nov. 19.
“We will make any adjustments from my standpoint that we need to make,” he said. “So if it’s not and we make adjustments on our calendar and we play Ohio State the week of the 19th, from my perspective, that would be great. We will play whoever is going to be scheduled for us.”
