It was Aug. 11 that the Big Ten announced it would be postponing its fall sports season — notably football — amidst concerns over safety during the coronavirus pandemic.

Today, the Big Ten announced It would be resuming play with a nine-game regular season kicking off the weekend of Oct. 23-24.

That was merely 36 days ago. A presidential vote to postpone flipped from 11-3 against playing to being unanimous — according to the Big Ten — in favor of moving forward.

So what changed? The pandemic may be far from over.

"The time that the conference took over these past few weeks has been time well spent," said Purdue president Mitch Daniels, one of those 11 votes that flipped from nay to yay. "In trying to protect campuses as a whole, a lot has been learned, some new technologies and improvements have come along in the interim. Now we'll be able to start a nine-game season under safer conditions than we've had a few weeks ago and really the safest conditions of any conference in the country."

As training camp had just gotten underway early last month, it did so against the backdrop of concerns over both the effectiveness and supply of testing and the sheer magnitude of the contact-tracing challenges.

When questions over potential cardiac problems tied to COVID-19 — "and I think they were more than just questions," Daniels says — it threw another significant obstacle in front of a path to football, In the presidents' view at least. According to a statement from the Big Ten forced out by looming litigation, only Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio State voted against postponement.

Purdue's president, at least, said he was an "advocate" this time around for returning to play, comfortable with the litany of guardrails put in place, announced by the Big Ten Wednesday morning.

The biggest piece of that equation: The availability of rapid-response testing, to be performed daily on pretty everyone who might set foot on the field, athletes and staff alike. The conference is negotiating with a pair of companies to determine which will provide the Big Ten with their product, the efficiency of which should change the complexion of coronavirus management and containment.

Daily testing "should drive contact tracing down to almost nothing," as it pertains to athletic activity-related contacts, A.D. Mike Bobinski said.

While rapid-response testing — to this point, schools have been using polymerase chain reaction testing, which doesn't universally yield immediate results (and is expensive) — was always the biggest piece of this puzzle, myocarditis — a condition connected to COVID-19 that inflames the heart and is believed to bring the threat of cardiac arrest — weighed heavily in the calculus toward both postponement and resumption.

To that end, the Big Ten unveiled a detailed plan to handle the cardiac angle on any Individual who may test positive for the virus, a battery of tests, including, according to a press release, "labs and biomarkers, ECG, Echocardiogram and a Cardiac MRI," Involvement from cardiologists and a waiting period of 21 days before an athlete can be eligible to return to competition after a positive test.

This and all the other safeguards put in place was enough to to compel conference leadership to lift the moratorium on Big Ten football and proceed.

"I will say that I think the conference was always looking for a solution, from the day that we hit the pause button, really, the conversations never stopped," said Daniels, who since the onset of the pandemic has strongly advocated for Purdue University operations to return to as close to normal as possible. "I will just tell you and constantly point out that with all we're dealing with trying to keep campuses open, we've put a ton of time into athletics, which I think these last few weeks just illustrates how important we all know this is. So really, there was not a gap in between the search for a workable solution and then to learn more about these big question marks around cardiac threats and the efficacy of testing, the search for those answers really went on without interruption."

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Now, Purdue and its 13 Big Ten peers move forward. There will be games to play a little more than two months after it seems as if there'd be none for quite some time. It will be an eight-game season plus one cross-over divisional game, a Big Ten title game, and then whatever the postseason may look like. The Big Ten will have its access to the College Football Playoff, much to Ohio State's delight, especially.

But hard realities remain.

The Big Ten's television package for this season will be lucrative, but far from a panacea for the entirety of the financial havoc COVID-19 has wrought. Purdue — and it's certainly not alone in this — has laid off or furloughed staff, cut salaries considerably and turned to a fund-raising campaign in hopes of merely subsisting. Prior to the resumption announcement, Bobinski was planning for a $50-million shortfall. He didn't immediately know on Wednesday now much this year's media deals would bring.

But we do know that there will be no general ticket sales, only family members In attendance, at least to begin with. That may be revisited In progress during the season, but that still means gate revenues are almost entirely lost, on top of this season being shortened without non-conference play. It's a good problem to have, but now Purdue faces operating costs for the season, too.

The financial implications of all this will come into focus over time, but in the short term, coaches wanted to coach, players wanted to play and fans wanted to watch, and on Wednesday, all of the above got their wish.

The Big Ten believes it has found a safe and ethical path toward a 2020 season.

Ultimately it will be up to those involved to make sure it works.

The Big Ten has also implemented mechanisms that will interrupt practices and potentially affect teams' ability to compete should positivity rates reach certain thresholds. The college football season thus has clearly Illustrated the perils of managing this virus at the moment, as numerous games have been postponed and numerous rosters decimated by positive tests and contact tracing.

Big Ten protocols read like a steel trap for virus containment, but It's what occurs away from the football facilities that will loom especially large.

"It's going to be a matter of how we can control our players outside and social environments that's going to determine if that number gets too high," Coach Jeff Brohm said. "So we're hopeful that we can get in every game on our schedule, just like every other team is. But I do know that it's going to be some stringent guidelines that we're going to have to follow and those numbers are a low percentage that we're going to have to do a great job outside of the facility to make sure that we don't exceed that in order to play football."

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