The Nebraska football team officially entered their testing partnership with the Big Ten Conference last week.
What we know today is the league will provide a maximum of 170 tests per team to cover players, coaches and essential staff around the program. Those 170 people will be tested daily by a third-party company the league has put in place.
After the initial 170, it is not known today what will happen to the others who don’t make the cut.
“Obviously, a limit on the size of a roster affects us more than it would about any team in the country,” NU head coach Scott Frost said this past Friday. “The walk-on program has been a very important part of Nebraska football for generations. We're still working through the details on that.
“I give them credit coming up with a lot of rules and ways that we can play football. We're just grateful that we're actually going to get to play football. That's the right decision, but I also want to be able to give all of our student-athletes, that are on our football team, an opportunity to practice and compete. We're still working through that right now.”
Today, the Huskers have 154 players listed on the official Huskers.com roster.
It is estimated every team will have at least 50 essential staffers between coaches and other personnel that also will need to be tested.
At this time, Frost can only worry about getting his team ready to play, and not all other logistics.
“We just have more football players on our team than other people do,” Frost said. “We're willing to test them, buy more tests, whatever we have to do, and hopefully, we'll have that opportunity. Again, we're still working through that. It's unclear right now.”
Another thing we don’t know is traveling arrangements.
Will the Big Ten keep the travel roster size at 74? Will they allow overnight stays on the road, especially for 11 am games? Will they require teams to bus when traveling falls under a certain mileage?
As of Monday, NU still didn’t have answers to a lot of these questions.
“We've received a number of documents from the Big Ten,” Frost said. “They have a lot of work to do so you understand trying to put all these protocols in place and think through all the problems and hiccups that could arise. I don't know much about those things yet. We got a little bit of time before that first game and hopefully, we'll come to some clarity on those things. I'm just trying to get a football team ready right now. The documents they're sending us are 20 pages long and read like contracts. There's still a lot of questions that we have. Right now, we just got our head down trying to get our team ready and hopefully, we'll have time to solve some of those issues.”
With that said, Frost and his team will be ready to play no matter what the rules and circumstances are.
“We were one of the teams that really fought to be able to play. I'm glad we did that because we were fighting for football,” Frost said. “That was the right thing to do. We're going to have to comply with any and all restrictions and qualifications in order to be able to play. We're going to be as careful as we can. We want to give our student-athletes an opportunity to do what they came to Nebraska to do. Hopefully, we get to play as many games as possible. Hopefully, we get to play all nine.”
