UGA Prez: Working Towards Normal Season w/ Fans at Sanford

ATHENS - UGA president Jere Morehead said Thursday that he is planning on football with fans this fall. 

"Our hope at this point; our expectation at this point is that we'll have a normal football season and be able to play all of our games,” Morehead told WGAU. “We are certainly working toward that goal. I think as time goes by, and we see the course of the pandemic; we will have a better sense of when, for example, to have football players back on campus. That's a key issue because the football players need to get into (condition). They need to be involved in practice. We didn't have spring practice this year, so at some point this summer that will have to happen for us to have a normal football season."

Morehead is one of 14 presidents in the SEC that meet weekly to discuss the 2020 season. He said he hopes UGA football players can be back on campus working out in July. 

“We hope that we'll have our players here at some point during the month of July. We will just have to see how the various developments related to COVID-19 affect that timeline, but our commissioner is very focused on this issue,” he said during the interview. 

But, Morehead stressed, if Georgia doesn’t play this fall it will have consequences for the athletic department. 

“One of the the things I have to emphasize is that even though Greg McGarity has done a great job of being very conservative in finances, which is now proving to have been absolutely critical, even a school like Georgia would be devastated by not having football season because football is the driver financially for all the other athletic programs that we have. It's also what brings this campus together - brings Bulldog Nation together,” he said. "So I'm very optimistic, very hopeful that we'll have a full football season."