Blue White Illustrated

to have a Blue-White Game and what that might look like." Looking beyond the spring, Barbour said Penn State is planning for a number of contingencies regarding home atten- dance. The rollout of COVID vaccines has given rise to hopes that the 2021 sea- son will not be played in mostly empty stadiums as it was this past fall. But while there are now some potent weapons with which to fight back against the virus, there's no way to know at this point how much optimism is warranted. "We're planning, obviously, on a 2021 season where we'll have fans," Barbour said. "We can scale that to everything from 107,000 on down. As we get closer to that, we'll have to take a look at, if there are restrictions, what they are, and what the financial ramifications will be. We're looking more at what would be the operational things? What role will the vaccine play? Will people need to show us a certification that they've been vaccinated? Will you be asked to wear masks? It's things like that – how we operationalize and how our fans see coming to Penn State football. I'll tell you this: Based on the rollover and new [season ticket] sales, we're over 90 per- cent renewed. The passion for Penn State football, and now the pent-up de- mand, is huge. Will there be people who won't come because of their concerns? Probably. There will be some. But we have to operationalize it, and then we have to project what we're looking at from a revenue standpoint." ■ EMPTY HOUSE Even if PSU is able to play a spring game, Beaver Sta- dium may be largely empty, as it was last fall. Photo by Steve Manuel Barbour framed Yurcich's hire as an in- vestment that will help bring the kind of on-field success that the athletic de- partment needs in order to grow its rev- enues. "I think it starts and ends with long- term financial stability and viability, which for almost all of us is going to manifest itself in success in football," she said. "And so, like a lot of things that we've talked about over time, whether it be assistants or facilities or other things, investment in football and then success from football is always going to be a key factor. Yes, we have some financial chal- lenges because of COVID, and it's still to be determined how long we might be dealing with those. But I also know that growing revenue is going to be a big part of the answer to any question or any way out of financial challenges, and cer- tainly, football sits at the top of that list." ON FALSE POSITIVES One of the prob- lems that Penn State ran into during the football season was an abundance of false-positive findings in its COVID testing regimen. Barbour said only one other Big Ten school had a comparable percentage of false positives and noted that the conference and testing com- pany Quidel weren't able to resolve the issue. "With the five analyzers that were in the Lasch Building to do all of football's tests in the fall, we did experience, per- centagewise, more false positives than, along with the one other program, [the rest of the conference]," Barbour said. "And we kept working with both the Big Ten, but more importantly Quidel, to try to get to the bottom of it. And I'll be honest, we never did. "And so when they tried to move those analyzers to another location within Penn State Athletics, we just sent them back and said no, you take these back." Because of the prevalence of false- positive results, a Penn State Athletics staff member has been driving every batch of antigen-positive tests to a lab every day they occur. "It's cumbersome, and it's labor-in- tensive, but we put our antigen posi- tives, with a driver, a staff member who's maybe underemployed at this point, and they drive them to the lab every day if we have them. And then we get those results back in the after- noon," Barbour said. "It's not ideal from the labor standpoint and maybe the cost standpoint, but we're able to get them back on a timely basis. But the good news is that we're not experi- encing as many of them. Rightly so, that was a little bit frustrating with football." ■

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