Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

Furman just cut it's men's lacrosse and baseball programs.

 

That news about South Carolina ending classes at Thanksgiving because it expects a surge in C19 puts athletics in an odd spot. Tough to keep the athletes on campus and non-social distanced when everybody else is sent home.

 

I could see it even happening to baseball and softball. A season or two full of multi-team double elimination or round robin tournaments where they are playing two games a day and eliminating those mid-week series.

 

I presumed it's meaning live videos of in-stadium shots, because they tend to make people crowd together in clowning around?

 

Not even a "Get in the hole!"

 

Like the rest of the campus, Furman's baseball stadium in beautiful. Leo Mazzone was a special advisor to the program.

 

I fear Furman is only the first of several schools to whack the lacrosse program. So many Southern schools have started the sport in recent years. It was a great trend. Unfortunately, the youngest program is the easiest to kill off.

 

Yeah, son of a friend accepted a scholarship to play lacrosse at Mercer starting next school year. This is a bad omen for him.

 

You'll probably see the same trend with baseball at northern schools. California almost killed it a few years ago and only brought it back after making a CWS run that charged up the alumni. I could see them using this as a reason to pull the plug. Probably some smaller conference schools in the Mountain West and MAC that would look at doing away with it as well. I think Boise State just started up a program a year or two ago, so if they haven't invested too much into it yet it would make sense to eliminate it before they do.

 

Amazing that the University of California would consider cutting baseball. I've been there and it's not a great facility. Cramped, etc. But wow.