Syracuse, N.Y. -- The NCAA announced on Thursday that it would not conduct championships this fall, meaning the Syracuse soccer, field hockey, cross-country and volleyball teams won’t be able to compete for a national championship during their expected season.
The cancellation does not apply to the FBS football championship, which is not run by the NCAA.
The cancellation of fall sports by programs and conferences across the country has dwindled the participation in those sports under 50 percent, the organization’s threshold for holding a championship.
“We cannot now, at this point, have fall NCAA Championships because there is not enough schools participating,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a social media clip. “The Board of Governors also said if you don’t have half the schools playing a sport, you can’t have a legitimate championship. We can’t in any Division I sport, which is everything other than FBS football. Sadly, tragically, that will be case this fall. Full stop.”
It’s not immediately clear what this means for the Syracuse fall programs. Representatives of the school’s athletic department could not be immediately reached.
Some conferences have expressed a desire to try to have their fall teams play in the spring and Emmert said he hopes NCAA Championships can be held in the spring. But if Syracuse teams don’t play in the fall, that would leave the uncomfortable situation of having the revenue-generating football program as the only team actively participating during a pandemic.
Syracuse could also continue to have its fall sports compete in the fall and culminate the year with the ACC Tournament, which does include some of the country’s top teams in most sports. While the NCAA runs the season-ending championships in most sports, the decision whether to play the regular-season resides with schools and conferences.
Football, the most high-profile fall sport, has seen its most powerful leagues diverge in direction over the past week. The Big Ten and the Pac-12 both canceled their fall football seasons while the ACC, SEC and Big 12 are currently planning to push forward with a football season.
The NCAA’s announcement on fall sports came on the same day that a number of the organization’s medical experts offered pessimistic perspectives about the idea of playing sports in the fall during a conference call with reporters, indicating that earlier hopes that the country would have the pandemic under control have not played out as they expected.
While the state of New York has controlled the spread of the coronavirus, it’s still raging in other portions of the country, most notably in Florida, which set its record with 277 deaths on Tuesday.
The organization also talked about recent findings that it was aware of about a dozen cases in which an athlete contracted coronavirus and then as found to have myocarditis, a heart condition which can pose a risk for sudden cardiac arrest and death. It’s unclear how closely the two are linked, though the findings served as a reminder of how much about the medium and long-term impact of the virus is unknown.
“I feel like the Titanic,” Carlos Del Rio, an executive associate dean at Emory University and a fellow with the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told reporters during that conference call. “We have hit the iceberg, and we’re trying to make decisions of what time should we have the band play. We need to focus on what’s important. What’s important right now is we need to control this virus. Not having fall sports this year, in controlling this virus, would be to me the No. 1 priority.”
While there is a chance that the country shifting toward indoor activities in the winter will worsen the pandemic in parts of the country, the medical experts also expressed hope that a vaccine, better testing and better behavior could create a safer environment across the nation.
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