Positive COVID-19 tests skyrocketing for Texas football, Clemson

Clemson and Texas football are two programs that have more than 30 confirmed positive novel coronavirus cases heading into the weekend.

All of the news coming out around the country concerning the testing for the novel coronavirus is not appearing good for a number of blue blood college football programs. Two of the most severe problems of positive COVID-19 tests are coming from the Texas football program and the Clemson Tigers.

Earlier in the week, the Longhorns announced that 13 players had tested positive for COVID-19 (confirmed via ESPN report). Texas now reportedly has all 13 of those players that tested positive in self-quarantine, and they are all asymptomatic as of the time of the report.

But Texas was not the only one to get bad news on this front as the week moved into the weekend.

According to a report from Matt Connolly of The State in a post on his Twitter timeline on June 19, the Clemson football program had 23 players test positive for COVID-19 this week. That is a double-digit number higher than what the Longhorns had in their initial set of COVID-19 rapid and antibody tests.

Apparently Clemson had five other tests that came back positive for athletes and staff of other athletic programs. Yet, there’s not a clear number of positive cases of COVID-19 that the rest of the Longhorns athletic programs came back with yet.

This news dropped at the outset of summer workouts for both Clemson and Texas. The distraction throws a bit of a wrench into a potential clear roll out of the six-week NCAA approved preseason plan to get the programs ready for the upcoming 2020 season.

And more bad news dropped across the college football landscape in general this week, with the announcement that the first set of major events in the sport were cancelled. According to a New York Times report from June 17, four games including Jackson State vs. Tennessee State and Southern vs. Tennessee State have already been cancelled thanks to lack of economic viability.

These are all bits of news that will continue to be a challenge for the college football landscape to adjust to as we have to learn to co-exist with COVID-19. Any program like Texas that has more than a dozen players testing positive for COVID-19 will have a lot of distractions to deal with in the midst of this pandemic.

Texas is supposed to open their 2020 season slate on Sep. 5 at home at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium against the South Florida Bulls. We’ll see what happens, and what adjustments have to be made, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic in the weeks leading up to the supposed kickoff of the 2020 season.