UTEP and Rice cancelled their game Saturday because of failed antigen tests in Houston. Those tests were administered as part of a prior agreement with Rice. Typically the teams pass three tests before playing but with the holiday, the rapid test in Houston was suggested by Rice, and agreed to by UTEP.
Those rapid tests showed ten positives.
The subsequent PCR tests performed back in El Paso were negative.
UTEP head coach Dana Dimel took responsibility for agreeing to those protocols but it really should not have been his choice to make.
Teams, leagues, and the entire sport are navigating their own protocols and there should be more guidance from the higher levels.
Of course, with the entire pandemic being politicized 1 it is difficult to get the kind of national guidance necessary for performing this kind of coordination.
CUSA proceeded with the season amidst a nationwide pandemic and got some early attention in the college football vacuum. Now it is struggling to complete what is left of the season while maintaining something like competitive balance.
North Texas and UTSA played the only game of this round. Early today (Monday) the Charlotte and WKU game was cancelled. Just Sunday we learned that the league was going to try some dynamism to allow teams with a chance of earning the title game bid to play the minimum required games to do so.
Rapid testing is the goal, but when they are as unreliable as they were on Saturday, we do not have a working solution.
There is precious little time left to sort out the rest of the schedule and varying levels of interest in completing the season overall and unreliable testing only serves to worsen the situation.
By this I mean used negatively to drive a wedge of rhetorical division ↩
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