The ongoing crisis that is the COVID-19 pandemic only seems to be worsening in the United States, and all throughout this semester, the Ram’s sports section has been bringing you updates from the many athletics programs across our campus and checking in with teams to see how they are staying fresh, staying together and, above all, staying positive in a time that no amount of years in playing or coaching could have prepared them for.

Most of our university’s teams (basketball, softball, baseball and a majority of the others) have been waiting on the protocols and jurisdiction of the Atlantic 10 Conference to know when they can resume scheduling events with other programs. But Fordham Football finds itself in a completely different situation.

Since the A-10 Conference does not play football, the Rams take to the gridiron in the Patriot League, as they have done for the last three decades. While most of Fordham’s fall sports still had hopes of perhaps playing during the fall semester, due to the Atlantic 10’s caveat of possible resumption after an October “look-in window” that eventually proved unsuccessful, the fate of Fordham Football’s season was at the hands of the Patriot League higher-ups, who canceled the entire fall season outright back in mid-July. This fall marked the first one without football on the Rose Hill campus since 1963.

However, the Patriot League, much like the A-10, has not yet closed the door on the potential of fall sports during the spring season, running simultaneously with the usual spring sports and causing a madness and mayhem across college campuses that those of us in the sports world have previously only dreamt about.

With that possibility still looming, however feasible it might actually be, Fordham Football is still working out, staying in shape and preparing for a season that, if it happens, will be the most unpredictable and perhaps most memorable time in the program’s history.

All of this need for preparation in the face of such clear uncertainty begs the question: Just how exactly can a team keep working on being in shape and also building itself up as a team? What workouts do you do; what workouts can you do? Luckily, this team has solutions.

What the Rams have been doing is splitting time indoors and outdoors three days a week. Throughout the semester, the team has been meeting on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and doing sessions in the weight room and outdoors. In the morning, half of the players are in the weight room, doing light workouts with utmost safety and health precautions, and the other half are outdoors, distanced and doing light workouts. In the afternoon, the two halves switch. Fordham head coach Joe Conlin is quite happy that with such heavy restrictions, he is still able to not only have workouts that are safe but also keep everyone on his team on the same page.

“We’ve been able to keep the number of guys in the weight room at a time well under what the limit is,” Conlin said, also satisfied with the fact that he has been able to keep his team on a regular and set schedule in a time when it seems that nothing else has been regular. “These have all just been light workouts, inside and outside, so that the guys can stay in shape and be ready for whenever they need to be ready.”

That question of when they would need to be ready is probably the question that is looming largest over Fordham and the entire Patriot League right now. As of the writing of this article, the closest estimation as to when things could possibly start again for the conference would be February 2021. The idea of starting in that time of year brings about the potential of the Rams beginning their season in an environment and temperature that players are not used to. 

This variable is actually something that the Fordham program has given some thought to, and if the words of Conlin are any indication, the team is not too worried about it.

“It is certainly something that we’ve thought about, you have to give some thought to every possibility. But our guys have played in tough conditions before, so if we have to play in the cold, snowy rain, then they’ll be just fine,” he said.

And no matter when this season does get played, whether it be in February or somewhere a little further down the road, if the would-have-been 2020 Fordham Football season does get played, the biggest question is how the season will go. In terms of wins and losses, the team finished 2019 at 4-8 but showed signs of improvement for the following season. Would this season, completely different from any before, change how the team would fare in competition against programs that are going through the exact same thing?

When asked about whether or not his expectations for how a season would go have changed amidst the madness, Conlin made it very clear that this is just not the way he likes to look at the team or the season. And he tries to make sure that his players don’t either.

“We don’t really look at things through expectations of a season or how many wins and losses we’ll have,” he said. “We just try to take this day by day and hope that every day we get better.”

That mentality of just taking things one day at a time in the face of a world that is so unpredictable is something that anyone who has lived through this virus and quarantine can surely relate to. And just like all of us, Fordham Football is doing its best to manage the unknown and stay on track.

We hope to be reporting on their games sometime in the near future.