For the second consecutive week, the University of Wisconsin has canceled a football game because of a coronavirus outbreak within its tenth-ranked team.
Wisconsin said Tuesday that it would not host Purdue University on Saturday, less than two weeks after the football program began to see a surge of cases. Wisconsin reported Tuesday that at least 27 players and staff members, including Coach Paul Chryst, had tested positive since Oct. 24.
“I share in the disappointment of our student-athletes and staff,” Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin’s athletic director, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We have seen a level of improvement in our testing numbers, but not enough to give us confidence to resume normal activities and play our game on Saturday.”
“We will continue to test regularly, take the proper health-related precautions and look forward to getting our team back on the field as soon as possible,” he added.
The infections on and around the football team have played out as the state as a whole has confronted some of its most wrenching weeks of the pandemic. Statewide, about 245,000 people have tested positive for the virus, and more than 2,100 people have died, many of them in October, according to a New York Times database.
Wisconsin, which had already canceled a game at the University of Nebraska, will play no more than six regular-season games before the Big Ten Conference’s championship matchup is set. Under the league’s rules, the run of cancellations leaves Wisconsin, the only ranked team in the Big Ten’s West Division, close to ineligibility for the conference’s title game. (The threshold, though, could change if more of the league’s games are canceled this season.)
More than three dozen top-tier college football games have been postponed or canceled for virus-related reasons since late August. The Big Ten said in August that it would not play this fall, but it reversed its decision in September and began competition in October.
— Alan Blinder The New York Times