The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Orgeron: Football is ‘lifeblood of our country,’ must be played
While some in college football are sounding pessimistic notes about the possibility of staging a season this year, the coach of the reigning national champions is determined to forge ahead — for the good of the country.
Speaking Tuesday with Vice President Mike Pence, LSU coach Ed Orgeron declared, “We need football.”
“We need to play. This state needs it, this country needs it,” he said, as Pence applauded.
Pence and his team traveled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday to hold a roundtable discussion and a news conference at LSU’s Tiger Stadium. He emphasized the Trump administration’s position that schools at all levels need to open this fall despite a surge nationally in coronavirus cases over the past month that has many education and athletics administrators worried about the dangers of bringing young people back into situations where social distancing will be difficult, if not impossible.
Louisiana has recently seen one of the sharpest spikes of any state.
Seated next to Pence during the roundtable discussion, with distance between them and between other participants, Orgeron declared “football is the lifeblood of our country.”
“It gets everything going, the economy going – the economy of Baton Rouge and the economy of the state of Louisiana,” he added.
Those remarks echoed some made in April by Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy, who said then “we need to bring our players back ... because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma.”
Another argument offered Tuesday by the 58-year-old Orgeron, who won numerous coach of the year awards for his work last season in leading LSU to a 15-0 record and a national title, was that being able to play in 2019 helped Tigers quarterback Joe Burrow go from “a projected sixth-round draft pick” to a huge contract as the No. 1 overall selection in the NFL draft.
“If he didn’t play last season, nobody would ever have known about Joe Burrow, and we wouldn’t have won a championship,” Orgeron said. “I don’t think we can take this away from these players, or take this away from our state and our country. We need football.”
The sport serves as a vital source of revenue for many universities’ athletic departments, and in anticipation of major shortfall if a football season can’t be staged, some schools have already announced plans to discontinue several of their sports programs. The Ivy League and the Patriot League have decided to cancel fall sports with no guarantees they will try to play football in the spring, while a pair of heavyweight conferences, the Big Ten and the Pac-12, have announced plans to eliminate all nonconference games this fall.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, who also attended the meeting, said afterward, “Time is an asset that’s rapidly slipping away . ... The fact we’ve seen increasing cases over the last few weeks across our region is not a positive indicator.”
Orgeron said his staff was the first to return after the coronavirus-related hiatus, was tested regularly and “nobody got sick.”
The coach also claimed when his players came back to LSU, his staff “spent a week educating them on COVID-19,” with the result that he did not think “any other team in the country was more educated than we were.”
Despite those efforts, approximately a quarter of LSU’s 115-player roster was reported last month to have been placed into quarantine over coronavirus concerns.