Jon Gilbert Interview

This is a true story. It's rare that your personal life ties it to guest booking at times. But over the weekend, based on the Big Ten news last week, my girlfriend asked me, hey, is the East Carolina Marshall game on still for August 29th?

And I genuinely didn't know the answer. Who might have some insight on that? How about we get in touch with the director of athletics with East Carolina, John Gilbert, who's kind enough to join us here. Before we get into, I mean, there's a couple of housekeeping notes to get to very quickly before we get to a broader discussion on what's going on in college sports. So let's just knock these out real quick. How confident are you that football is going to be played, that Marshall is going to be at Dowdy-Fickwin Stadium on August the 29th to face your Pirates?

I would say reasonably confident. Obviously, I think the next two weeks, we're going to know the fate of college sports in general. You've seen a couple other leagues that have pushed to the spring.

I think we'll know in two weeks time for sure. Obviously, Marshall is a part of the group of five, as East Carolina is. You have a game set for September the 12th at South Carolina, where a lot of people are believing that it's trending for especially the Power Five conferences to play only conference schedules. What's the latest you can tell us about your discussions with Ray Tanner and that game on the 12th in Columbia? Coach Tanner and I have talked multiple times this summer.

We talked as early as last week. All indications we're going to play the game. We've had no discussions about what it would look like if the game is not played. Unless we're told otherwise or the SEC makes a decision, we're still planning on playing a 12-game season as scheduled. Now, again, I really think the next two weeks, both from an institutional, I think you'll see schools are starting to decide what their fall is going to look like. Obviously, I think all the conferences in the next two weeks will decide what their fall is going to look like.

We're being joined by East Carolina Director of Athletics John Gilbert here on Sports Hub Triad. When the Big Ten news came out last week, I immediately thought about you guys and App State, which was set to play at Wisconsin before the news and has a game at Wake Forest even. When I think of App and ECU, I think of places that have their athletic identity based in football and playing power five schools.

If that ultimately doesn't happen, John, how big of a toll does that have on the group of five altogether? Well, certainly part of the financial makeup of the group of five is to play guarantee or buy games. We've been fortunate over the next couple of years. I don't think we have a guarantee game until 23 when we go to Michigan.

I think they're important though. I look at this year, going to South Carolina is really important for ECU because we need them to come to Dowdy-Ficklin the following year. We're not necessarily missing out on a guarantee if that game doesn't get played, but we are, I would say, concerned about making sure that they would return the following year.

You mentioned the leagues that are moving to spring. Specific to East Carolina, I was thinking about Clemson Athletics last week or maybe two weeks ago, putting out a survey to fans, which one of the questions included in it, would you prefer a fall schedule with no fans or a spring schedule with? Strictly talking about the economics, not what you would prefer because obviously you'd love to have football in the regular cycle, but just from an economic perspective, from a place like ECU where football is so important, what would be more beneficial, a fall schedule without fans or a spring schedule with? Well, for schools like ECU, playing without fans is more of a financial hit in that we would play the games, no fans. We still have all the expense of putting a game on, traveling to a game, all the ancillary costs with playing both home and on the road without the revenue. If you don't play the games at all, certainly you have the revenue hit that is big, but you don't have all the expense from it, so your bottom line is actually better for a school like us in that case. Does that mean the idea of spring football isn't that scary to you? Well, I'm not an advocate for spring ball, and I think that for a couple reasons. Number one, what we don't know on spring football is what will the TV networks do with spring football and all the other inventory that they have?

Will they value it the same? Because obviously that's another big funding piece for all the conferences and their TV contracts. The next component is we do approximately 225 to 230 events all year, athletic events, primarily at night and also on the weekends.

If you leave everything the same and you try to condense it all in the spring, it really is very difficult to do. And then third, which is probably the most important component of all this, is I do worry about the safety and well-being of our student athletes. If we tried to play a full spring schedule, then you have the summer and then we come back in the fall and play another fall schedule.

That's a lot of football in a very short window, and I'm not sure that that's good for the game either. Also, let's not forget who's to say that we are in a situation where we have a vaccine for the virus by the time we get to January and February. I'm not completely guaranteed that would be at that point. John Gilbert with us here at ECU, director of athletics.

Thank you. You know, I look at we go in late July, we go into our 20-hour week because we play week zero. I would say the end of July to August one is really our drop-dead date.

You know, we're going to need to know one way or the other at that point. And so that's really kind of where I have my calendar circled. Well, John, I just appreciate you spending some time with us. It's very illuminating. It's good to hear from someone like you who has as much knowledge as you do and as much insight and gives us a much better sense to realistically set our expectations for where things might be and where we might be headed. Thanks for doing this. Well, happy to come aboard and want everyone to continue to wear their mask to make sure we can get back to normal as quickly as possible. Well said. Thanks, John.