Coronavirus outbreaks have hit the Florida and Vanderbilt football programs in recent days.
Interestingly, the COVID-19 spread at Vandy and UF may have its biggest impact on the football season of Kentucky.
To accommodate games that had to be postponed due to the virus outbreaks in Nashville and Gainesville, the Southeastern Conference had to shuffle its football schedules late last week.
The SEC flipped UK's previously scheduled games the next two weeks with Georgia and at Missouri. When it did so, it did not do the Wildcats any favors.
Originally, Mark Stoops and troops were slated to play host to Georgia this Saturday, then travel to Missouri to face the Tigers on Halloween.
Now, the Cats are visiting Mizzou this week, with No. 4 Georgia coming to Lexington on Oct. 31.
"We've been scrambling today trying to get caught up here for Missouri," UK's Stoops said Monday at his weekly video news conference. "It's been a little change for us."
This is why the schedule alteration matters:
On the original, UK would be getting Georgia at home this Saturday. The Bulldogs, would be coming here off the 41-24 loss at No. 2 Alabama last Saturday that was properly billed as the SEC's regular season Game of the Year.
Under that scenario, Kirby Smart's Dawgs would have been ripe for a letdown in Lexington. That dynamic almost certainly would have boosted UK's shot at snapping its 10-year losing streak vs. Georgia.
The following week on the original schedule, Kentucky's visit to Missouri would have paired two teams that had each played the five previous weeks.
Mizzou would have faced UK after having played at Florida in its prior game.
Now, rather than that relatively level playing field, UK will get Missouri off an open date on the new schedule.
While Kentucky was blitzing Tennessee 34-7 in Knoxville on Saturday, Coach Eli Drinkwitz's Tigers enjoyed an unexpected weekend off after their scheduled game with Vanderbilt was tentatively shifted to Dec. 12.
Known as a keen offensive strategist, Drinkwitz should benefit from the extra time to create a game plan to confront UK's ball-thieving defense (10 forced turnovers in the past two games).
Meanwhile, instead of coming to Kroger Field fresh off its loss at Alabama, Georgia, too, will face Kentucky off an open date. That, presumably, will give the Dawgs time to heal physically and spiritually from the Bama beat down.
Conversely, on Oct. 31 against Georgia, UK will be playing its sixth SEC game in six weeks.
For those reasons, it's hard not to think Kentucky's odds of upsetting the Bulldogs would have been substantially greater under the first scheduling scenario.
"From a coaching standpoint, it is nothing major," Stoops said of the late schedule switcharoo. "The only negative is we are catching two teams in a row with two weeks to prepare and get healthy and get themselves cleaned up (in the manner in which they are playing) like we all like to do."
UK football analysts last week were already deep into video study of Georgia games, Stoops said, when word came that the Bulldogs would not be Kentucky's next opponent.
"We (had) a little more work to do Saturday night and Sunday (to get ready for Missouri) than is typical, but that's OK," Stoops said. "We've got that all caught up."
As we've seen this fall across all levels of the sport, one of the costs of playing football in a pandemic is rampant schedule instability.
So for the conspiracy-minded, I don't think the SEC was doing anything other than trying to formulate a plan on the fly to get through this most-challenging of seasons.
In the big picture, we all have far more grave things to concern ourselves with than how SEC-initiated college football scheduling adjustments could impact one team.
Fact is, we're fortunate to be getting SEC football this year at all.
That said, if you believe "how games set up on schedules" plays a large role in outcomes _ and I do _ it seems clear that the Southeastern Conference schedule switch of late last week made both of Kentucky's next two games more difficult to win for the Wildcats than they previously would have been.
Missouri "played very good last time out against LSU (a 45-41 Mizzou upset victory)," Stoops said. "We know they are getting better and better. They are a well-coached football team. We expect them to be rested and prepared for us."
During the pandemic, public health officials have emphasized how inter-connected we all are now, that the behavior of one can have a very large impact on many others.
Who would have guessed that one of the more stark examples of that would be how coronavirus outbreaks within the Florida and Vanderbilt football programs could end up impacting Kentucky.
