With no spring football this year, it fed into over an eight-month lapse since a member of the Alabama football team had a chance to speak to the media. Since the Citrus Bowl in January the world has changed drastically due to COVID-19 with many people questioning whether moving forward with sports is worth it.
Already there have been league cancellations from the Big Ten and Pac-12, but players in the NFL have also taken other precautions, even deciding to opt-out of playing this season at all.
Some college-level players had adopted the NFL’s decision making with players like Penn State’s Micah Parsons and Virginia Tech’s Caleb Farley to sit out the season.
No members of Alabama have made the decision to opt-out as of right now, but two of the team’s leaders, running back Najee Harris and quarterback Mac Jones both voiced their decisions to opt-in and commit to playing in 2020.
“I feel comfortable here, and if I was at home, maybe I wouldn’t even be as safe. I feel like that’s easy for me,” said Jones on a Zoom call on Friday.” I’ve played football since I was 5 years old, and a lot my teammates are the same way. We want to play football. That’s why we came here. We want to play football, and we want to win a national championship, and we want to see some of our players go on to the NFL. That’s just what we want to do. Every day, we take risks, and it might be a little risky, but we feel comfortable and we feel safe.”
When Harris was asked a similar question he did note the need for more certainty, but since figuring the virus out will continue to be time-consuming, he will just have to accept it.
“No, not once. I haven’t thought about opting out,” said Harris. “Now, there are concerns for me. Like we start camp in a minute and I’m not trying to go into camp really knowing that we might not have a season or not. It’s just so many uncertainties that it is what it is. That’s something to work with or I have to deal with. That was really the only concern I have. Opting out has never crossed my mind. It’s only going into fall camp knowing that we might not play.”
Despite the uncertainty, both players showed confidence in Alabama’s testing for COVID-19 even going as far as saying that players test “more than they practice.”
Jones and Harris have both been big advocates of the #WeWantToPlay movement which began with Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence’s tweet.
The offensive duo went into the need for players to speak out and let their voices be heard amongst college football.
“We started something to say, ‘We want to play.’ Athletes want to create value for each other this season,” said Harris. “We work hard, we work hard for this. Just to say we aren’t going to play is heartbreaking. So we thought we should do that.”
“We just wanted the people to hear our voice because, at the end of the day, the players are the ones playing, and we feel safe here, we feel comfortable,” said Jones. “Obviously, there’s a lot of unknowns, but we just wanted to get our voice out there. And obviously, we had a lot of guys that could have left last year and they came back, so we want to play for those guys. We want to play for the younger teammates, we want to play for the whole organization, the state of Alabama.”
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
