The back story of how EKU football ended up playing as an independent in 2020
The August winner for “most interesting college football program in Kentucky” is a runaway:
Eastern Kentucky has been on a fascinating ride.
Earlier this month, the powers that be in the Ohio Valley Conference decreed there would be no league football games in 2020 due to the coronavirus.
Instead, the OVC gave its members permission to play up to four non-league games this fall while holding out hope of a conference football season in the spring of 2021.
EKU said thank you, but no thank you.
Rather, in a scrambling bit of scheduling improvisation, new Eastern Athletics Director Matt Roan put together an eight-game fall slate that includes three road games at FBS schools.
Playing this fall as an independent, Eastern’s schedule has trips to Marshall (Sept. 5), West Virginia (Sept. 12), The Citadel (Sept. 26), Troy (Oct. 17) and Central Arkansas (Oct. 31) plus home games with Central Arkansas (Oct. 10), Stephen F. Austin (Nov. 7) and Western Carolina (Nov. 21).
Of those teams, only West Virginia and Western Carolina were on Eastern’s original 2020 football schedule.
A founding member of the OVC, Eastern decided to go rogue on that league’s aspirations for spring football for three main reasons, Roan said.
First was concern about the health impact on players of playing back-to-back football seasons in one year.
“Even if you play only seven (games in the spring) and then you play 11 ‘next year,’ that’s 18 football games in a calendar year,” Roan said. “For us, there were some serious safety concerns.”
The second problem was the weather.
“Where we are located, spring football is really winter football, at least the front part of the schedule,” Roan said. “Well, we lack an indoor facility. We lack a lot of equipment and supplies to be able to effectively support our football student-athletes with playing games in January and February.”
The third issue was worry it would stretch Eastern’s athletics staff and facilities too thin.
“When you talk about the size of our staff, the infrastructure we have from a facilities standpoint, it’s great but it is not designed — from our training room to out sports performance center — to effectively provide services for all 16 of our teams in one semester,” Roan said.
Moving forward, one wonders if Eastern going its own way with its 2020 football schedule will weaken the bonds of affection between the university and the OVC.
“I’m not naive enough to say that there is probably not some frustration (within the league),” Roan said. “I think, peer to peer, as I have talked with some of the OVC ADs, I think they kind of appreciate that what we did wasn’t a decision done in haste.”
For an EKU program with a new head coach in Walt Wells and a relatively young roster, the improvised schedule looks daunting.
Start with the FBS road games at Marshall, West Virginia and Troy. Roan said EKU will reap roughly $1 million in combined guarantee money from those three contests.
Then add home-and-away meetings with Central Arkansas, a top 10-caliber FCS team.
“You could argue that it is ‘over-scheduled,’” Roan said. “But, for us, it is a great schedule full of really unique and challenging (contests) and, really, kind of unique stories.”
Though athletics budgets are tight across college sports due to dislocations caused by the coronavirus, Roan said Eastern did not go shopping for football guarantee money.
“I’ve had ACC schools; I’ve had American Athletic Conference schools; I’ve had Conference USA schools and additional Sun Belt schools offer us (pay games),” Roan said. “If we wanted to chase money, we certainly could have.”
EKU did inquire about playing its ancient rival, Western Kentucky, Roan said. “We talked very early in the process,” the Eastern AD said. “... Dates were difficult to line up.”
Early this month, Eastern kicker Landon White quit the Colonels team after questioning whether the new EKU coaching staff was committed to keeping Colonels players safe by following COVID-19 protocols.
Roan said an investigation conducted by EKU’s human resources division “found there were occasional mistakes that we made with, maybe, masks not being worn while trying to instruct a student-athlete on the field. But there wasn’t anything that was egregious, any willful misconduct.”
Last week, Roan says, EKU “tested 187 student-athletes (for the coronavirus) with two positives. So a 1.1 percent positivity rate right now. We are encouraged by that.”
Since it is not scheduled to play at Roy Kidd Stadium until Oct. 10, Eastern has time before it has to firm up its plans on what number of fans it will allow to attend games.
“If we were playing tomorrow, it would be 25 percent fans (in the stadium),” Roan said. “That would put us at capacity of just shy of 4,500.”
Moving forward, it sounds like the August winner for most interesting college football program in Kentucky may spice up the start of September with a further schedule augmentation.
“We’re still having some conversations with a few different schools,” Matt Roan said.
