Dubai has emerged as the latest overseas venue that could host games to help salvage some cricket in the English season.

Last week, ESPNcricinfo revealed that Abu Dhabi Cricket (ADC) was set to offer its facilities to the ECB for use between October and January, with all professional cricket in England and Wales suspended until July 1 at the earliest. Tom Harrison, the ECB's chief executive, said on Friday that there had been "offers from multiple boards… as far away as New Zealand and Australia".

And Dubai has now thrown its hat into the ring to host games, as Salman Hanif, the head of cricket at Dubai Sports City (DSC), suggested he would "definitely be keen" to host whatever fixtures were on the table, whether internationals or county games.

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Restrictions have started to lift in the UAE following a strict curfew, and it would seem that the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic has been avoided there with 89 deaths reported to date. Malls have begun to re-open across the country, while the conditions of the lockdown have been loosened.

"If anything comes up - any bilateral series, or tournament - that has to be rescheduled, UAE would definitely be keen to host any of them," Hanif told the National. "It is still too early to plan, but if there is anything such as that being considered by the ECB, we would be more than happy to host them.

"We have hosted them in the past, and we would certainly offer the best of support, facilities and everything again. Outside of full member countries, UAE has the best cricket facilities, infrastructure, management support, and support for cricket organisations. We have proved that in the past. If anything comes up, I think UAE would be considered at the forefront."

There are three grounds at Dubai Sports City: the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, where England have played 12 times against Pakistan across all three formats, and two pitches at the ICC Academy which have regularly hosted pre-season county fixtures.

The ECB has repeatedly stated its intention to stage cricket in England and Wales this summer, with internationals and the T20 Blast prioritised as the most lucrative forms of the game. Harrison said last week that the ECB was "starting to get comfortable with the idea there won't be crowds this summer", suggesting that revenue from ticket sales would not be a major consideration.

Richard Thompson, Surrey's chairman, said last week that staging games overseas "has to be considered" but raised the "significant cost" of flying whole squads abroad as a drawback.

"Broadcasters are crucial to this," he said. "No governing body wants to breach an agreement with the broadcasters, so as long as it can deliver the product, it doesn't matter where it delivers it from." It appears that offers to play games overseas remain at a very early stage.

Last week, David White, the chief executive of New Zealand Cricket, told the Mail on Sunday: "We really feel for the ECB right now, given the disruption to their season, and are wanting to help in any way we can.

"I'm in constant contact with Tom [Harrison] and have communicated that offer to him, should it become possible at our end. We're part of a global cricket family, and we need to support each other."

Pakistan women's captain Bismah Maroof was critical of the ICC's decision to split points between India and Pakistan for a bilateral series that India failed to obtain governemt permission to play.

Maroof called the decision "deeply disappointing", remarking it was "good luck" for India to have effectively been awarded points for nothing. The ICC decision means Pakistan miss out on automatic qualification for the 2021 Women's World Cup, while India go through directly. Had the ICC decided to award full points to Pakistan, as they did in a similar scenario in 2016, it would have been Pakistan who went through, while India would have had to try to go through the qualifying route.

"The decision was very disappointing, because we had been waiting [for] a long time to play against India and the board was working towards it," Maroof said in a video press conference. "But we weren't getting any response from India. It's good luck for India, who got points without agreeing to play any matches. I suppose if we look at it in a positive light, we'll get a few extra competitive matches having to play the qualifying rounds.

"There's always hype when we're due to play India and the fans want to see those matches because they're usually very exciting. Pakistan showed a willingness to play against India, and Pakistan have kept sport away from politics. So it was very disappointing for us not to get these matches, and we were number four, in a position to qualify directly, before the matches were due to go ahead. If we had lost those matches and then had to qualify, that would have been easy to accept. But as things stand, those matches will have been missed by all cricket fans, not just Pakistan fans."

The ICC decision, which came a fortnight ago, has caused significant malcontent at the PCB. The chairman Ehsan Mani went public in expressing his own disappointment with the ICC, while the PCB was swift to get in touch with cricket's governing body to explore what further steps it could take.

The dissatisfaction, however, has not spilled over into any public censure of the ICC; Mani's statement aside, there has been virtually total silence from within the PCB by way of any further official communication. ESPNcricinfo understands the reason for this is the PCB's legal team considering bringing litigation to the ICC's dispute resolution committee. Maroof confirmed that should the legal team believe there were grounds to proceed in this manner, she would get behind it.

"The PCB's legal team is reviewing the decision as things stand. If they think there are grounds for a legal case, we should definitely proceed with one. It was very disappointing, and politics and sport should be kept separate," she said.

The PCB had attempted to engage with their Indian counterparts about the series on the sidelines of the last couple of ICC meetings, a series they viewed as a bilateral issue rather than one that needed ICC engagement. It appears they did not receive a meaningful response from the BCCI, either in writing or verbally.

In 2016, the ICC decided to give Pakistan full points when India failed to show up for a series, but there is one difference that looks to have secured a more desirable outcome for the BCCI. On that occasion, the BCCI offered no written explanation for the failure to proceed with the series, and the technical investigation committee found the BCCI had not been able to establish "acceptable reasons" for non-participation in the series.

This time around, the BCCI engaged with the ICC early on, making its stand clear about why it could not play Pakistan in the ODI series scheduled in 2019. ESPNcricinfo understands the BCCI made extensive submissions as early as 2018, demonstrating that it could not get the relevant permission from the Indian government to play Pakistan. That helped the ICC's technical committee to invoke the force majeure clause on this occasion.

"With respect to the India v Pakistan series, the TC (technical committee) concluded that the series could not be played because of a Force Majeure event after the BCCI demonstrated that it was unable to obtain the necessary government clearances to allow India to participate in the bilateral series against Pakistan, which forms a part of the ICC Women's Championship," the ICC said in a media release on April 15.

Meanwhile, Maroof paid a glowing tribute to her former teammate and former Pakistan captain Sana Mir, who announced her retirement earlier this week, saying women's cricket's reputation and profile in Pakistan owed plenty to Mir.

"Sana Mir is a legend of the game and an ambassador of Pakistan cricket. She was one of the great minds we all played under. We all grew under her, and the credit goes to her. The name women's cricket has here exists in a large part because of Sana's involvement with it. She has achieved a huge amount for Pakistan cricket, and she deserves all the praise she has received over the last few days. She is a true ambassador for women's cricket around the world and I wish her good luck in whatever she wants to do next."

A growing number of Premier League players do not want to play football during the coronavirus crisis in what is a major blow to the league's hopes of resuming the 2019-20 season, sources have told ESPN.

In a significant setback to the league's Project Restart scheme to get elite football underway after play was suspended on March 13, players across numerous Premier League teams have severe reservations about playing during the coronavirus pandemic.

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One source at a Premier League club told ESPN: "A lot of players are very uncomfortable with coming back.

"The only way the league takes this seriously is when someone at a club dies. We will look back on this time with sadness in the future."

Unlike leagues in Italy, Spain or Germany, the Premier League has not announced any kind of protocol for players to return to training.

Top-flight clubs will meet on Friday to discuss options for the restart amid growing opposition to playing, even behind closed doors. The United Kingdom's culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, has said he has been in contact with clubs about restarting the Premier League "as soon as possible," and UEFA has told leagues to outline their plans for resuming by May 25.

But sources have told ESPN that there is reticence among players, especially while the social distancing measures remain unchanged, to play again. That's part of the reason not every player has used the training facilities at clubs that started to resume work.

Arsenal were the first Premier League club to open their doors to resume training, albeit under strict social distancing, and further clubs have followed. But many still remain closed while the U.K. remains in lockdown.

A source at another Premier League club has told ESPN that players with young families and pregnant wives are concerned about playing football during the pandemic -- more than 20,000 in the U.K. have died. The source said many believe you can't play football and social distance. Sources have told ESPN some are wondering how it is possible they're being told to get ready to come back when the situation is like it is.

While talk of players striking if they're asked to return to play is premature, ESPN has approached the Professional Footballers' Association for comment regarding their plans to support those who do not wish to return. The PFA have yet to comment.

Ligue 1, France's top division, has been cancelled along with the Eredivisie in the Netherlands, with Belgium's top league also cancelled.

The NCAA's top governing body said Wednesday it supports a proposal to allow college athletes to sign endorsement contracts and receive payments for other work, provided that the schools they attend are not involved in any of the payments.

A working group assembled to evaluate a way to modernize the NCAA's rules when it comes to athletes making money from their names, images and likenesses presented its recommendations to the Board of Governors during its annual April meeting Tuesday afternoon. The recommendations included significant changes to current restrictions while also leaving room for the NCAA and schools to regulate what kind of deal athletes might be allowed to sign in the future and the monetary value of those deals.

"Allowing promotions and third-party endorsements is uncharted territory," board chair Michael Drake said in a release Wednesday morning.

The NCAA's press release said athletes will be allowed to appear in advertisements and can reference their sport and school, but they would not be able to use any of the school's logos or branding in those advertisements.

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith, who co-chaired the working group in charge of evaluating NIL payments, said the proposed changes will move through the NCAA's regular rule-making process. Member schools will have a chance to give feedback and input during the next several months. Smith said in a press release that a vote on the proposed changes would likely occur in January 2021.

The working group's recommendations are not guaranteed to remain the same in the nine months before NCAA leaders are expected to vote on new rules, but they would represent the most significant step forward to date in a long debate over college athlete compensation. It is a process that college administrators, critics, athletes and NCAA officials have said took too long to catch up to the modern reality of college sports. The NCAA gradually relaxed limits on what schools were allowed to provide to their athletes in response to civil lawsuits during the previous decade. The large name, image and likeness push in the past year was prompted by politicians who have created state laws challenging the NCAA's current rules.

California became the first state to pass its "Fair Pay to Play" law last September. Nancy Skinner, a Berkeley-based state senator, wrote the bill that says colleges in her state cannot punish an athlete who accepts endorsement money from a third party or hires an agent to try to profit from his or her popularity. More than two dozen other states introduced similar legislation in the wake of California's law, which is scheduled to go into effect in 2023.

The new proposals would still be more restrictive than what California's law will allow. The NCAA said in its release Wednesday morning that it plans to ask members of Congress to create federal legislation that would supersede various state laws and create one uniform standard. The NCAA will also ask Congress to help establish a law that allows them a "safe harbor" in the face of potential lawsuits regarding NIL rules and is careful to make it clear that college sports are different that professional leagues.

NCAA leaders say it is crucial to keep the distinction between their organization and pro sports. Their amateurism status allows the NCAA to defend itself against antitrust violation lawsuits and to hang on to non-profit tax exemptions that are important to the college sports business model. This unique status has helped the NCAA carve out a niche in the eyes of federal judges who have ruled that the NCAA's caps on what an athlete can receive from his or her school violate antitrust laws, but determined the schools can continue enforcing those caps because college athletes are students and not laborers.

NCAA president Mark Emmert is expected to answer questions on the new proposal Wednesday morning along with Drake, Smith and working group co-chair Val Ackerman.

Imagine the Iron Bowl ... in May. Or, something even more inconceivable ... no Iron Bowl at all.

With the coronavirus pandemic affecting sports calendars worldwide, conference commissioners and athletic directors across the United States are considering every alternative to college football's current Aug. 29 start date, including playing the entire season in the spring of 2021.

The worst-case scenario in college athletics would be canceling the entire season. It's a possibility decision-makers throughout the sport are determined to avoid while acknowledging it's something they can't fully control.

The people who ultimately will decide when college football returns will include federal government officials and state governors, plus the newly formed NCAA medical advisory panel and a host of NCAA subcommittees.

ESPN interviewed dozens of athletic directors, coaches and commissioners from the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) conferences over the past few weeks about what the future might hold for college football based on their ongoing daily discussions, which change constantly as new information emerges. So far, the consensus is that while no one knows what will happen next, officials are determined to save the season in one way or another.

"There isn't a model I can run to fix the problem of not having any football," UCF athletic director Danny White said. "I don't think there's anybody in my position with a big football fan base that could make decisions to fix that. I don't know what happens -- there's not a model, there's not a solution, there's not an action I can take that's going to solve that problem."

Several conference commissioners told ESPN the first and most important step is determining when it's safe to reopen campuses -- a decision they said they will leave to medical experts and government officials. (Brown University's president wrote this week in The New York Times that opening campuses this fall should be a "national priority." Stanford's president, meanwhile, said Tuesday he does not expect a decision about the fall quarter until sometime in June.)

Among the scenarios under consideration: a shortened season in which leagues would primarily play conference games; a delayed start to a full fall season; a spring season; or starting on time, but without fans. There also could be some combination of these scenarios. Officials also are bracing for the possibility of what several have referred to as an "interrupted season," where the season begins but has to stop because a second wave of the virus hits. There's no specific timetable to make these decisions, but most coaches say they would need about two months to get their teams ready.

"You're coming out of a year in which now we have this financial crisis, and we have no certainty of what the future looks like," Mid-American Conference commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said. "We have no certainty of when we can begin again. We have no certainty of when we will have a football season, which is the economic engine for all of this."

There are too many uncertainties surrounding any decisions on what the season will look like -- from conditioning, to how many games teams will play, to when the season starts, to whether fans will be in the stands.

Miami coach Manny Diaz might have summed up the entire situation best.

"We all know what we want, but we've encountered something that's unprecedented," Diaz said. "We have to play it out and see what we can get. That's the difference. Let's see how good we can get it. I believe we'll all be appreciative for whatever we get."

Jump to: What teams need to get ready | Shortened season
Spring season | Playing with no fans

'You're going to need two months to get these guys back'

Penn State coach James Franklin asked his sports scientist, strength staff and athletic trainers to weigh in on how long it will take to get the players physically prepared to play a game once they're given the green light to resume practice.

They began working on about six different models.

"Is it 30 days, is it 45 days?" Franklin said. "Sixty days? Ninety days? What is it that's needed to make sure that we're going to be in good shape, that the players are going to be able to protect themselves and go out and compete on a high level?"

The opinions vary from coach to coach, but the general consensus from our interviews is about eight weeks. The first four would be spent mainly in meetings and with strength and conditioning coaches, with some walk-throughs beginning in Week 3. Then, in Week 4, the players could put on pads and helmets again and start a true "fall camp."

"You're going to need two months to get these guys back going again before you can even consider putting them on a field and asking them to play football," Arizona State coach Herm Edwards said. "When you rush back, that's when you get the soft-tissue injuries -- hamstrings, Achilles tendons, groins -- because you haven't done anything. Pro players, they have a sense of, 'I gotta work out, I make my living doing this,' but if you're a college kid, and a lot don't have access to gyms where they can lift, it's not like he's in football shape."

Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the director of sports medicine at the Cedars-Sinai Kerlan-Jobe Institute and team physician for the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Dodgers, agreed with the coaches' timetable.

"As far as being able to get together as a team and be able to really ramp up the physical conditioning necessary to compete -- if you're coming into the whole process in pretty good condition -- that usually still takes about a month or six weeks to ramp up the intensity to where you're ready for the season," he said.

West Virginia coach Neal Brown said the preparation period should differ by position type.

"The guys up front, it's more about getting in shape from a strength standpoint where they'll be able to withstand contact, be able to push, lean, and those types of things. For the skill guys, it will be more about their cardio and short bursts and protecting against those soft-tissue injuries," Brown said. "A lot of people say, 'Well, back in the old days we just showed up at fall camp.' Yeah, well, fall camp was six weeks long. You had opportunity to get in shape, practice multiple times a day -- we're not allowed to do those things anymore. So I think that's why the lead-in is so important."

It's not just the physical preparation, though. There's the learning curve for freshmen, and installation of new plays.

Texas coach Tom Herman hired Chris Ash as defensive coordinator and Mike Yurcich as offensive coordinator, and said much of the new terminology and philosophy has been teachable remotely. Herman said resuming practices on June 1 would be ideal in order to start the season on Sept. 5, but even if they were told on Aug. 6 or 7, they would "figure it out."

"I know this sounds crazy because it's a completely new defensive system and a good amount of new concepts and ideas on offense, but ... the X's and O's part of it, that's the least of my worries, to be honest with you," Herman said. "Now we get four hours of virtual meetings, and coaches are testing their kids."

First-year Baylor coach Dave Aranda said he would like 60 days to get his players ready, but for now, he's trying to invest his time "in things that will stick," like concepts and situations.

"Hey, it's a two-minute situation, or hey, it's the end of a half, the start of the second half, it's four-minute situations," Aranda said. "Teaching our players, but keeping them engaged, as well ... seminal moments in a game where it's like, 'Oh, I remember that,' things we can invest in that they can carry back whenever it is we do get back together."

Edwards also said everyone will need to be tested for the coronavirus, which just raises more questions about the availability of tests, who is providing them, and more.

"Why wouldn't you do that?" he said. "You've gotta do that. That's got to be part of the program now. It's kind of ironic. We play a sport, there's no social distancing in this sport. Social distancing has been working. We don't do that in this sport."

American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco agreed, saying the possibility of an "interrupted season" due to a potential second wave of the virus is a concern for the commissioners.

"If you were going to play again, obviously, you'd have to realistically have some kind of testing protocol, and we're getting there," he said. "That's the problem. You might start playing, and the next thing you know, you've got somebody sick, and then next thing you know, you've got a whole team quarantined. How do you play with teams quarantined?" -- Heather Dinich

Could teams play a conference-only schedule?

There are many questions about what the season will look like when it actually begins. Among the most pressing: What if a full season cannot be played?

Every athletic director and coach we spoke to wants to do everything in their power to get in the entire season, and there are obvious reasons for that. Coaches do not want to take away playing opportunities from their players, especially since they have only 12 games to start with, far fewer than other sports.

What's more, the financial implications of playing a shortened season would be substantial, not only for Power 5 schools but also for FCS and Group of 5 programs that rely so heavily on guarantee nonconference games.

That becomes a much larger issue if a shortened season means going to a conference-only game scenario.

"The domino effect, I would have to imagine, would be devastating to those schools," TCU athletic director Jeremiah Donati said. "We play an FCS opponent this year, and it's pretty widely known that they rely on the revenue they get from the guarantee to play Power 5 schools. I can't speak for all of them, but if you play two or three of those, that can be anywhere from $2 million to 4 million, and for a smaller school, that's huge, that's your lifeline. To pull that away would be absolutely crushing."

There are other examples on the Power 5 level. Can anyone imagine a world where Florida and Florida State don't play each other? In the ACC alone, there are four nonconference rivalry games between SEC and ACC teams that no one wants to lose. But those rivalry games seem small compared to perhaps the biggest nonconference rivalry game of them all: Army-Navy.

Now add in independent Notre Dame as the giant X factor in the equation, especially for a school like Navy. Notre Dame and Navy are scheduled to open the season in Ireland on Aug. 29.

"Devastating, devastating. The two biggest games we have all year are nonconference: Notre Dame and Army," Navy athletic director Chet Gladchuk said. "Both of those contests are so critically important to our financial picture, losing those two games would be simply devastating to us financially. They're of great significance for television purposes, ticket sales, corporate sponsorship. They're the two anchors that are really important."

Speaking of Notre Dame, what happens to independents in a conference-only game scenario?

"Would you have a season without Notre Dame having any football?" Aresco said. "OK, you play nine games, so Notre Dame could figure out some nonconference games. And it's not just Notre Dame. Would Army suddenly not play football? There are no simple answers. You'd at least have to have a nine-game schedule so independents could play."

Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said if the season has to be shortened, the easiest solution might be to make the reduction "calendar-based more than anything, like the first two weeks don't happen.

"I understand the importance of conference schedules, but [there are] complexities of trying to move games within the season as opposed to just doing it based off a calendar," Swarbrick said. "If you start saying, 'We're going to take this game and we were going to be in City X and we're moving it to a different date,' that's not easy to do from a travel, from an accommodations, from a fan/ticket sales dynamic."

The bottom line in any scheduling scenario: Coaches will take what they can get, and if that means a shortened, conference-only season, then that is what it will have to be.

"If it came down to it and we were still allowed to play football, we'd have to live with that consequence," Kansas State coach Chris Klieman said. "Obviously, you'd like to play as many games as you can for a variety of reasons. Not just for this year, but for your freshmen two years down the line.

"We're a developmental program, I want to try to play as many as we can to prepare ourselves for our conference. That's still financially going to cost an awful lot of people an awful lot of dollars if we don't play those nonconference games. If that were the worst-case scenario, I think we'd all say, 'OK, we have to live with that,' but we'd rather play our nonconference schedule as well." -- Andrea Adelson

'Do you know how screwed up the football season would be if we started in February?'

Governors in some states warn that major gatherings won't resume without vaccines or herd immunity. Prominent athletic directors are publicly opposing games without crowds. The most realistic compromise is an unprecedented one: a spring season.

According to ESPN Stats & Information, no major college football team has played a game between February and July since the 19th century. But a spring 2021 model likely avoids some obstacles a fall 2020 season carries. Campuses are expected to be open by then, and teams will have ample time to prepare after a long and strange layoff. Pushing back the season also buys time for improved testing, treatments and other developments that would make games safer for participants, stadium personnel and fans.

"[A spring schedule is] getting more and more discussion," Aresco said. "Would you be able to play right after the Super Bowl and play an eight- or 10-game schedule and still have a short playoff? You probably could, and you might try hard to do it because football is so important on a lot of levels, but the financial [impact] is huge."

A spring 2021 season raises multiple hurdles -- weather, television scheduling, the NFL draft timetable and a short turnaround for a fall 2021 season; but if given the choice between a spring season or no season at all, many would reluctantly choose the former.

"In order to have an athletic department, we need to play football for everybody, because of the finances that go with it," NC State coach Dave Doeren said. "There's going to be back-end issues that come up the later it goes, but I don't think that means you cancel it, either. You figure out how to deal with those issues as we go."

A spring season likely would begin sometime in February and run through May, with postseason games in late May or June. The regular season would run concurrent with the NCAA basketball tournaments, and bowl games or the College Football Playoff could overlap with spring championships. Television schedules, including many involving ESPN, would have to be adjusted.

Nick Carparelli, the executive director of the Football Bowl Association, said as long as there is a regular season, he fully expects a full bowl season.

"Each of those games is a separate and individual enterprise with its own unique model and objectives, and they simply can't take a year off and expect to pick up where they left off the following year," he said. "Most college football programs depend on the bowl season for their postseason. If there is a college football season this year and institutions hope to participate in bowl games in future years, we're going to need to find a way to play the games this year."

Weather is a concern for schools in colder climates. Although the Big Ten, MAC and northern schools in other leagues finish the regular season on frigid fields, the spring model would require them to kick off that way. What would a Feb. 20 season opener look like in Minneapolis or Madison?

"Bring out your snow shovels," a Big Ten coach said.

"If I'm in the Big Ten, I'm probably not real excited about that," Donati said. "I don't know if you're going to draw too many fans to football games in Michigan in January or February. That sounds like a nightmare."

(Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren declined our request for an interview.)

Another concern is how a spring season would affect the future, for college teams and players with NFL aspirations. Teams use the spring to spin forward: winter conditioning in January and February; practices in March and April; recruiting in May.

More recruits are enrolling midyear to capitalize on a full offseason program. How would a spring season affect them, or change roster and scholarship limits?

"Do you know how screwed up the football season would be if we started in February?" Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi said. "Are you going to play next September, too? You're running one season into another. You screwed up another spring, you never get back on track."

A spring season also impacts the NFL and players aspiring to reach the sport's top level. The entire NFL draft timeline -- the Senior Bowl and other competitions in January, scouting combine in late February, individual pro days in March, draft in April would likely move back significantly. Would there even be a combine? Would the NFL hold its draft during the college postseason, like Major League Baseball does during the College World Series?

College football players regularly skip bowl games to preserve themselves for the draft. Would a player such as Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence really play in the spring when he'd be mere weeks away from a multimillion-dollar contract?

"Your guys that were either going to graduate or declare early, there would have to be some type of agreement with the NFL," Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley said. "That's going to affect draft preparation."

Coaches and administrators currently are hyper-focused on athletes' health and safety regarding COVID-19, but there's a long-term risk to pushing back competition. A full spring 2021 season combined with a full fall 2021 season means players could log 24 regular-season games in 10 months or so. Add in postseason play, and the number of games for top teams approaches 30. Even if both seasons were shortened, players would have less time to rest and recharge, or rehabilitate from significant or moderate injuries.

"These kids would be beat to hell," Narduzzi said. "I don't think you can do it. These kids need a break. Think about the players' bodies."

"You hear a lot about postseason surgery lists, you hear a lot about postseason surgery choices," said Tory Lindley, the president of the National Athletic Trainers Association and director of athletic training at Northwestern. "There's a whole list of orthopedic injuries at the end of everybody's year that we're looking at, that we can manage. But as soon as it's over, that surgery needs to occur. When I think about the spring season followed by the fall season, you're going to have a lot more of that as a primary health concern, surgeries that you're going to have in May, and in many cases that student-athlete is not going to be ready to return for that August season."

Given all of the above, a spring season is viewed as a last resort, but the alternative could be even more disruptive.

"If we don't have college football, almost every athletic department is going to be bankrupt," a Power 5 coach said. "We support every other sport other than maybe men's basketball, so I would think every AD and every commissioner would do anything they can to have the season. For one year, if it's a nontraditional season, who cares?"

In terms of the coronavirus itself, the only thing a spring start would guarantee is more time to prepare.

Multiple epidemiologists told ESPN that if COVID-19 behaves in a way similar to other respiratory viruses, it's reasonable to allow for another surge between December and February. The only thing pushing back the season to the spring guarantees is time to prepare. It is highly unlikely that the additional time will bridge the gap to the availability of a vaccine, but it would afford more time for the medical community to develop better treatment methods. More tests also could be more readily available, while college athletic departments can potentially implement more sophisticated plans on how to adapt as necessary.

"Even some of the medications, expecting that they'd be ready by January for any kind of mass distribution, I think is being really overly optimistic and certainly not the vaccine," said Dr. Jonathan Mayer, an epidemiologist, infectious disease specialist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. "I don't really see a delay of three months making much difference. Better than nothing. It would buy some time and result in conditions where decisions don't have to be made quite as soon. But I think that's being overly optimistic." -- Adam Rittenberg

'It would be hard to say that it's not safe for fans ... but it's safe for 100 football players'

Boston College's Jeff Hafley has envisioned running out onto the field for his head-coaching debut countless times.

"It would be a little different coaching my first game as a head coach looking up and seeing the only one in the stands be [AD] Martin [Jarmond] waving at me," he said.

Just about everyone we spoke to cannot fathom college football without spectators, because fans are the lifeblood that separates the sport from so many others. Swarbrick said earlier this month, "I don't see a model where we play, at least any extended number of games, in facilities where we don't have fans."

There is a reason for that.

"The pageantry of college football and the fans are so much intertwined with the players and the game, I just know how much that means to the players and how much it means to the fans, I think that would be really hard to do," Texas Tech coach Matt Wells said.

Most coaches we spoke to favor delaying the start of the season in order for fans to be present.

"If we have to wait for just a little bit to give the fans what they've been waiting for and something to look forward to and provide them with some entertainment and allow them to have some fun and enjoyment, it's something we do have to talk about," Hafley said.

But there also is one question that comes up repeatedly during these conversations. If it's not safe for fans to be in the stands, why is it safe for the players?

"It would be hard to say that it's not safe for fans to be there, but it's safe for 100 football players, officials and coaches," one Power 5 coach said. "We have players from all over the country and what are these players going to do when we're not playing? Are they going to be sequestered? Are they going to be in one dorm? If we're doing that, am I going to go home and sleep in my own house? You're putting all these kids and coaches on the front lines. This thing is so contagious it takes one kid on your team to expose your team, your staff and your opponent. This whole idea they're going to put the participants in a bubble, especially the size of a football team, I find that a hard scenario."

Let's say fans are allowed to attend games. Athletic directors are already making plans for what that environment could look like as part of a "new normal." In a recent Seton Hall poll, 72% of Americans said they wouldn't attend games before there is a vaccine for the virus.

Louisville athletic director Vince Tyra said his department is rethinking the entire setup of the football stadium, from the concourses to the placement of tents outside the stadium to the number of gates used for entry.

"We all have a different philosophy about whether we want to be in a stadium of 50,000 people even after this has passed to make sure this is truly gone," Tyra said. "Some subset may say the coast is clear but another may say, 'I'll wait 90 days until I show up in the stadium.' What are you going to do about tailgating and social distancing in the parking lot or in the stands -- those concerns are secondary to what do I do about the packed lines at the entry gates -- that's where people are elbow to elbow. We're already thinking about those things."

There are too many uncertainties now to make any decisions about what the season will look like -- from conditioning, to how many games they play, to when it starts, to whether fans will be in the stands.

Several epidemiologists we spoke with were skeptical that shifting the college football season to the spring would make a significant difference in terms of being able to play in front of crowds.

"It's just hard to tell what would happen in the fall, but I think there's very unlikely to be anything in place that would allow large numbers of people to congregate, whether in August or January," said Dr. Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health. "When we lift these physical distancing and community mitigation methods, we're going to do it slowly and it will be, maybe stores will reopen.

"I'm just making this up [as an example], but maybe 20 people can be in there at the same time, you know? I graduated from the University of Michigan. The Big House has what, 105,000 people or something? That's a whole lot of people in one place." -- Andrea Adelson

ESPN reporters Kyle Bonagura and Mark Schlabach contributed to this report.

Manny Ramirez still misses stepping into the batter's box and wants to return to professional baseball at age 48.

The former MLB superstar has his sights set on the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, where he briefly played in 2013.

In an interview published Wednesday by the Taiwan Times, Ramirez told the newspaper that he hopes to land a roster spot this year in the CPBL.

The five-team CPBL has attracted worldwide attention in recent months as the first major professional baseball league to start its 2020 season amid the coronavirus pandemic.

ON APRIL 18, instead of concocting a game plan to possibly defend Giannis Antetokounmpo on the opening day of the NBA playoffs, Garrett Temple was locked in on antithesis passages in his online LSAT prep course.

With the 2019-20 NBA season on hold since March 11 due to the coronavirus, the Brooklyn Nets wing has been putting in the hours studying, listening to law podcasts and talking to professors as part of his weekly preparation for the Law School Admission Test.

While some players have tried to fill the basketball void with video games or training routines, others have taken on new challenges to stay sharp. From mastering a second language to becoming handy around the house to diving into a Lego world, players are finding ways to stay engaged.

And one might even be law school-bound, with sights on a perfect 180 LSAT score.

"I can't let -- what's her name on 'Legally Blonde' got a 179 -- Elle Woods [beat me]," Temple said. "I really want to do it and get a great score."

MORE: When will the NBA return? Latest suspension updates

BEFORE THE SUSPENSION, Temple had long been contemplating life after basketball. The 10-year journeyman graduated from LSU in 2009 with an undergraduate business degree and considered getting his MBA. His father, Collis Temple, told him that a law degree would be more beneficial.

Collis is an entrepreneur in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and was the first black varsity basketball player at LSU after Turner's grandfather, Collis Temple Sr., was not allowed to attend graduate school at LSU because of his skin color.

Temple's interest in pursuing a law degree was further piqued after watching a TED talk by Adam Foss, a former assistant district attorney in Boston and advocate for criminal justice reform. The final push came when Temple met Bryan Stevenson, the nationally acclaimed public interest lawyer and social justice activist depicted in the 2019 film "Just Mercy."

"I think you can create a lot of change in your own community," Temple said. "Help change the prison industrial complex and school-to-prison pipeline in my community, the black community."

Temple has immersed himself in science podcasts and magazines with help from his fiancée, Kára McCullough, a scientist with a concentration in radiochemistry.

She has also often forced Temple to take breaks from hours of studying. The veteran guard just can't help himself.

"It's providing structure. I'm really enjoying it," Temple said.

"I mean, we ain't got nothing else to do. So I'm studying, man. Just trying to better myself."

CODY ZELLER KNEW next to nothing about carpentry before the season went on hiatus. But a month and a half in, the Charlotte Hornets center can now build a closet befitting a 7-footer. (It's a skill that has been quicker to learn than playing the guitar, which others such as Antetokounmpo and Patty Mills have also picked up.)

After Zeller's brother, Tyler, a free agent who most recently played with the Memphis Grizzlies in 2019, purchased a home in Indiana, Cody has been helping with do-it-yourself home-improvement projects.

"I took responsibility for [Tyler's] master closet," Zeller said. "I had no woodworking ability before. I've learned how to use a miter saw, a table saw. We put it together."

"Everybody and their mother is gonna have a podcast when we are done with this quarantine."

Georges Niang

Lack of experience? That was nothing a few YouTube tutorials couldn't solve -- almost.

"I will say, full disclosure, I had to [build] it twice," Zeller said, "because the first time I messed up."

Zeller cut, sanded and painted all the wood and built a seven-tier shelf rack. But when he went to fasten the frame to the wall, he had forgotten one tiny yet crucial detail.

"I realized I hadn't accounted for the space between the closet rod and the shelf above it, so there was no room for the hangers to hang on the closet," Zeller said. "So it was back to the drawing board.

"That was like three days' worth of work down the drain. Anyway, long story short, it looks great now."

THIS EXTRA DOWNTIME has given John Collins the chance to master a second language and get more in touch with his family heritage. Collins, whose mother is part Puerto Rican, has been taking Spanish lessons via Rosetta Stone and the Duolingo app.

The Atlanta Hawks big man took Spanish classes in high school in West Palm Beach, Florida, before continuing courses during his two years at Wake Forest.

"I never had a chance to finish -- obviously I left school early," Collins said. "But it's always been something that I've wanted to finish just 'cause I have been around it so much, and I want to learn."

Although he could grasp what his grandfather and other relatives were saying during conversations, Collins found writing in Spanish to be difficult. After the first few weeks of quarantine, Collins wasn't sure how much his Spanish was improving.

"I'm better than where I was," Collins said. "To get real growth, I got to go over to a Spanish-speaking country.

"Hopefully one day I will get the opportunity."

USED TO MAINTAINING a strict in-season schedule, Utah Jazz forward Georges Niang found the extra free time jarring.

The team dropped off a stationary bike and weights so he could keep up with daily exercises, but video games have grown boring, Netflix has provided only so many hours of entertainment, and sleeping in has lost its appeal.

So he started the "Drive & Dish" podcast and video series with help from the Jazz.

"Everybody and their mother is gonna have a podcast when we are done with this quarantine," he said.

After an unsuccessful foray into Instagram Live -- "It was horrible content," Niang said -- "Drive & Dish" debuted on March 31 and has delved into quarantine life with Jazz All-Star Donovan Mitchell, the Olympics postponement with two-time soccer gold medalist Amy Rodriguez and the Michael Jordan Game 6 winner with former Jazz player Bryon Russell.

Niang even has his own theme song and logo.

?#DriveAndDish Episode ? is LIVE! ?@GeorgesNiang20 interviews @spidadmitchell about that night in OKC, what he wishes he'd known as a kid & his strangest superstitions ?#NBATogether
???? ????? » https://t.co/7uQk59B8Po pic.twitter.com/MCY4rAUsaj

— utahjazz (@utahjazz) April 3, 2020

The podcast's name is inspired by his team nickname. In the Jazz locker room, Niang is known as "the minivan" because he likens his teammates to Ferraris while thinking of himself as a less luxurious vehicle.

"I need a couple laps around the block before I get warmed up," Niang said. "Hop in the minivan and drive and dish."

KENT BAZEMORE HAS been teeing it up at some of the best golf courses in the country. Virtually, that is.

The Sacramento Kings swingman has been regularly retreating to the basement of his Atlanta home, honing his skills on a golf simulator that would rival Tiger Woods' personal setup. Video cameras and sensors track Bazemore's every hook, slice, chip and putt.

"It is about as in-depth as I can get without being a professional golfer," said Bazemore, who earlier this month took down former teammate Stephen Curry in a virtual match at Pebble Beach.

Now the lefty has a chance to get serious about his golf game. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, Bazemore takes virtual golf lessons with his instructor, Jon Tattersall, the 2014 Georgia PGA Teacher of the Year.

And Bazemore still drives to a real golf course once a week -- Georgia is one of a handful of states allowing courses to stay open.

"I am on a quest to become a scratch golfer," Bazemore said. "My handicap right now is at 8 and I need it to be down to 0."

To get over the next hump, Bazemore said he plans on working with a sports psychologist.

"There's a lot of things that go into becoming [a scratch golfer]," Bazemore said. "I'm on the fringe. This is the closest I've ever been."

THOUSANDS HAVE FLOCKED to social media over the past month to listen to DJs such as D-Nice spin sets on Instagram Live.

Now Andre Drummond has joined the wave.

On April 20, the Cleveland Cavaliers center kicked off "Drummond Quarantine Radio," which features Drummond with DJ Drewski from the center's Miami home.

Last week, Drummond hosted a "ladies night" set, when viewers could make song requests. And he put on "Talent Show Thursday," which featured an appearance by actor and comedian Michael Rapaport, among other special guests.

Drummond's no novice. He goes by the rap name "DRUMMXND" and is planning on releasing his second album, "FYI 2," soon.

He won't be the only NBA player releasing new music during quarantine. Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon dropped his Dwyane Wade- and dunk contest loss-inspired diss track "9 out of 10" on Monday.

On Tuesday, Gordon made a guest appearance on the seventh episode of "Drummond Quarantine Radio." Drummond pointed out that for as long as they've known each other, he never knew of Gordon's desire to put out rap songs.

"I mean we got a lot of time on our hands right now, ya hear me?" said Gordon, who started making music before this season and is working with Grammy Award winner Austin Owens, also known as Ayo The Producer.

"I get to tap into my creative side," Gordon added. "Get in touch with emotions and express myself."

Gordon then gave DRUMMXND his next quarantine endeavor -- to deliver some new rap hooks.

"We putting together a project, [with] athletes, with Ayo," Gordon said. "We need you on the project."

"We need a couple of verses for the project. Please."

LOCAL GYMS SHUT down after Dallas County issued a shelter-in-place order on March 23, but Myles Turner had to find a way to get in weight training while staying in the guest house of the Texas home he built for his parents.

So the Indiana Pacers center jumped online to find the nearest squat rack -- more than 100 miles away in Waco.

"In Texas, that's nothing," said Turner, who embarked on the four-hour round trip along Interstate 35. "That's just an easy drive, right down the street."

Turner then built the multipurpose squat rack and bench press in under two hours with help from friends. It's now the centerpiece of a once near-empty garage he's converted into his personal gym, complete with medicine balls, adjustable dumbbells and a padded floor.

"I gotta improvise," said Turner, who last week shared his passion for yoga via a live class on the NBA's Instagram page. "I've always kind of been into just putting stuff together."

And when he didn't have a screwdriver or wrench in his hand, Turner was still busy building. He assembled one Lego set, and his latest creation -- a 2,000-piece Star Wars jigsaw puzzle -- was completed in about a week.

"I am about to go to Target right now," he said, "and get a basketball hoop for outside."

You love baseball. Tim Kurkjian loves baseball. So while we await its return, every day we'll provide you with a story or two tied to this date in baseball history.

ON THIS DAY IN 2015, there were no fans.

The riots in Baltimore postponed two White Sox-Orioles games until this date when a game was played. But, for everyone's safety, no fans were allowed inside Oriole Park. I covered that game; it was one of the eeriest stories I've ever written. We were not allowed to leave the press box. There would be no presence in the stadium seats. We sat quietly and watched the Orioles beat the White Sox, 8-2, in one of the strangest games ever.

The full "On this date ..." archive

In the first inning, the Orioles' Chris Davis hit a home run; he circled the bases in total silence. We are so conditioned to hear crowd noise, the reaction to something important happening, and yet there was none. "You could hear the ball land,'' said then-Orioles manager Buck Showalter. "You know how during early batting practice, with no one in the park, you can hear where the ball lands? I love that sound. That's what it was like that day.''

It was so quiet, Showalter said, "I could hear every word said by Gary Thorn and Jim Palmer (the play-by-play man and the color commentator for MASN). That was weird. There was no walk-up music. Guys just walked to the plate and hit. I think the game lasted like 2:05 (it was exactly 2 hours, 3 minutes. But you had to be careful what you said to the guy in the on-deck circle, or to the guys on the bench, because everyone could hear it. You really had to be careful around the umpires because they could hear everything. It was so quiet, we didn't even need the bullpen phone. I just yelled, 'Hey, better get (Zack) Britton up!'''

Caleb Joseph was the catcher for the Orioles that day. "It was the strangest thing,'' he said. "I was catching a major league game, and I could hear the announcements being made in the press box. I had never been able to hear that before. One of the announcements was some interesting fact, and I'm thinking, 'That's so cool. I didn't know that.'''

Other baseball notes from April 29

In 1988, the Orioles, after a 0-21 start, finally won their first game, 9-0 over the White Sox. Catcher Terry Kennedy said the team was glad it was over, "but there was no celebration. There was no relief. We were all just so embarrassed to even be a part of this.''

In 1931, Wes Ferrell threw a no-hitter, hit a home run and a double, and drove in four runs. He might be the best hitting pitcher of all time. In 1935, for the Red Sox, he hit a walk-off home run in a game he started. The next day, as a pinch-hitter, he hit another walk-off homer. The Red Sox wouldn't win consecutive games with a walk-off homer for another 70 years. And it will never happen again that a pitcher will hit walk-off homers in consecutive days.

In 1934, Hall of Famer Luis Aparacio was born. Man, it was fun watching him play shortstop.

In 1986, Boston's Roger Clemens became the first pitcher to strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning game. His next start, also against the Mariners, came five days later. The day before that game, Clemens was interviewed by a confused TV guy in Seattle. He said to Clemens, on the air, "Roger, the last time you faced the Mariners, you struck out 30.'' Clemens, remarkably patient, said, "Well, it was actually only 20.'' The TV guy patted Clemens on the shoulder, then said, "Well, maybe 30 the next time.'' To which, Clemens should have said, "Yeah, I'm going to pitch 10 innings and strike out everyone.''

Last summer, Mark Arduini was unemployed and struggling to motivate himself to fill out job applications. So he went to a local card shop, bought a box of 24 unopened packs of 1987 Topps and bribed himself: He could open one for each application completed.

As he was flipping through one pack, he came across card No. 500, Don Mattingly. On the back, under Mattingly's career stats and above a line of baseball trivia, Arduini read the one-line Mattingly bio. It was a jaw-dropping scoop: "Don's birth certificate states he was born in 1962, not 1961 as shown in most baseball records."

The birth date at the bottom of the card is also 4-20-62, and if you look closely, you can see that the "62" is slightly off-line. The first draft of the card, it appears, had used the '61 common to most baseball records. One imagines a "Stop the presses!" moment at the Topps factory, as the correct year was apparently fixed by hand.

Arduini went online to confirm that most baseball records had since been corrected. But they hadn't. Baseball-Reference.com: April 20, 1961. Wikipedia: April 20, 1961. MLB.com: 4/20/1961. "Everywhere I looked, the birth date still -- 32 years later -- hadn't been fixed," Arduini told us. "So I checked back in with Topps, and guess what: On Mattingly's 1988 card, his date of birth was listed as 4-20-61. This fun fact, Mattingly's 1962 birth date, only appears in two places: his 1987 Topps baseball card and his birth certificate. Now, I've never seen Mattingly's birth certificate, but Topps has; they said so right there on the card."

So Mark hired us to solve this puzzle. One route would be tracking down Don Mattingly's birth certificate, but in Indiana, birth certificates are presently considered closed records, available only to people who can provide "proof of relationship or direct interest to the person named on the record." We then tried to go to the source: Mattingly. We asked the Marlins' press department, who happily pledged to find out from Don himself. And we asked Mattingly's agent, who also chipperly promised to get the truth straight from Don.

And then neither party was heard from again. We started to wonder whether Mattingly, and the powers that be, wanted to keep something a secret.

So we had to take a different route: We had to dive into the baseball card industry circa 1987, when it was transitioning from making disposable bike-spoke smackers to producing the higher-quality, get-rich collectibles. We had to track down the uncredited writer of a single sentence written on the back of a piece of cardboard more than three decades ago so that we could figure out whether the author of "Don's birth certificate states he was born in 1962, not 1961 as shown in most baseball records" was a crank or a whistleblower. And that's what we did.

He wasn't a crank.

The Hit Man

In the late 1980s, a few years after Donruss and Fleer broke Topps' monopoly on the baseball card industry but a few years before the card companies began to seed their sets with rare inserts and subsets, there were two types of baseball cards worth more than a buck or two: the ones that were really old and the rookie cards of star players. Even the latter usually took time and patience for investors, as the player's stardom and stature needed time to grow. It was hard to open a pack and get rich -- even rich by kid standards.

Don Mattingly was the biggest baseball star of the early junk wax era, and because he had gotten so good so young, his early cards were both valuable and attainable. In 1984, when he was 23 (according to most baseball records), he won the batting title. He had power, smooth defense, charisma and pinstripes on his uniform. He was prophesied to be the next great Yankees icon, picking up the lineage from Ruth to Gehrig to DiMaggio to Mantle, which had seemingly reached its end with Mantle's 1968 retirement. In 1985, the supposedly 24-year-old Mattingly won the MVP award, won his first Gold Glove Award and drove in 145 runs, the most by any hitter in nearly a decade. In 1986, he finished second in MVP voting, and by 1987, his Donruss rookie card was going for $100. It was so precious that it inspired counterfeiters, one of whom was himself such a precocious talent -- a 13-year-old Florida boy who printed 1,000 at a local copy shop and then sold them for around $40 apiece to gullible dealers -- that his scam became a national story, further elevating the Mattingly card hype. "That's why I make an argument for Don Mattingly to be in the Hall of Fame," a former Upper Deck executive told Dave Jamieson, author of the book "Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession." "He's the one that bailed out the card industry in 1987."

Baseball players have lied about their ages forever -- even Hall of Famers -- but they do it to make themselves younger. A 20-year-old putting up good numbers against 18-year-olds isn't a prospect; a 16-year-old doing the same is. Indeed, when there were references to Mattingly's age during the first half of his career, they snarkily suggested he must be older than he was listed: "Somebody find the birth certificate. Don Mattingly can't be only 24 years old," the South Florida Sun-Sentinel wrote in the spring of 1986, right before Mattingly's official 25th birthday. Writing about him in the spring of 1989, just before his official 28th birthday, Peter Gammons called it "hard to believe" that Mattingly is "just 27 years old." Harder still to have believed he was even younger.

But that's what 1987 Topps charged Mattingly with. Donnie Baseball was already a star, but his early career, reassessed under the 1962 birth date, begins to look legendary:

• His .345 batting average would have been the highest by any 22-year-old since Stan Musial (in 1943) and Ted Williams (in 1941).

• His .349/.444/.488 line during his first year of pro ball would have come when he was nine months shy of his 18th birthday, a full year younger than his draft class.

• When he hit .463 over his four-year high school baseball career, and reportedly tied the all-time national record for career RBIs, it would have come while he was actually the equivalent of an eighth-through-11th-grader.

• When he was named all-city in basketball as a junior -- in Indiana, a state known a little bit for its high school basketball players -- he would have actually been the same age as most sophomores.

We do know that Mattingly had been publicly identified with a 1961 birth date even before he joined the big league club and got famous.

• In September 1980, when he was still in the minors, the New York Times called him 19 years old; that puts his birth in 1961.

• When he was in his first professional season, his manager filed a scouting report on him, describing him as 18, which would imply the 1961 birthday.

• Right after his high school graduation, he was featured in Sports Illustrated's Faces in the Crowd. It said he was 18, reflecting the 1961 birth date.

So if he were lying, he was doing it at least as far back as then.

Why would a player conceivably lie to make himself older? That's hard to reckon. One initial theory was to make it possible to get married. Mattingly was 18 -- by the 1961 birth date -- when he got married in the summer after high school. Maybe, we guessed, he would have needed to for a marriage license application. But that theory was weak: His wife was only 17 at the time, a grade behind him, according to news reports from Mattingly's early career. She actually left school to follow him. So it's clear the couple didn't need to be 18 to be officially wed. Perhaps a very young Mattingly would have needed to fudge a birth date to play a level up in youth leagues, so he could play against competition that would challenge him? That makes ... some sense? Maybe?

But the record seemed to be pointing toward the "written by a crank" explanation. Yes, we found a second reference to a 1962 birth year -- in "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract" (2001) -- but James told us those birth dates were all drawn from "standard sources," suggesting this was merely a typographical error. And we found a confusing discrepancy in the 1988 edition of the Baseball Encyclopedia, where his birth year is listed as 1961, but his birth date is listed as April 21, not April 20. But the next edition had his birth back on April 20 (1961).

Everything else but the card was consistent. Until, in the process of trying to read every article that mentioned Don Mattingly and a birthday, we discovered an Associated Press article from April 21, 1987, a few months after Mattingly's 1987 card back would have been written:

Mattingly's second homer of the season, in the first inning, came on his birthday. Exactly which birthday is subject to debate; he says he is 25 years old, the Yankees say he is 26.

The story goes on to say that Mattingly showed the Yankees his birth certificate to prove it.

Whaaaaaaat ...

Cardboard Literature

In 1987, you wouldn't go to the back of a baseball card to discover a player's deepest secrets. You might not go to the back of a card for the words at all.

Donruss' card backs used simple three-dot lists of career highlights (e.g. "Joined Lou Gehrig as the only Yankees to achieve 200 hits three straight seasons ... AL MVP in '85"). Fleer published low-fi heat maps of hitters' strengths in the strike zone. Topps used its card back space to carry one more statistical column than the other two. It included a piece of baseball trivia unrelated to the player on the card. And it offered a one-line, first-name-only biographical detail that was almost always innocuous, to the point of self-parody:

• Ken [Griffey] and his wife are the parents of two sons.

• Kevin [Mitchell] devotes time to spend with NYC youths.

• Mike [Greenwell] was voted MVP of his Little League team.

• Bob [Brenly] derives enjoyment from college basketball.

These are the sorts of details you might pull from team media guides -- and, indeed, many of the Topps bios at the time probably were. To that end, we checked with the Yankees to see whether their media guides in 1986 or 1987 could have been the source of the 1987 Mattingly card back. Michael Margolis, director of public communications, said the media guides listed his birth year as 1961: "I can tell you according to the 1986 media guide he enjoys racquetball. No mention of the birth certificate."

In retrospect, it's odd how little craft was put into those bios. "Baseball cards are the only product on a typical candy rack to set forth baseball statistics. They are, in other words, an education in baseball," wrote the judge who ruled against Topps' monopoly in 1980. But it's much more common to hear adult baseball fans say they learned math from the stats on the backs of cards than to hear they learned to read from the backs of cards. For decades, a baseball card back was one of the most read pieces of literature in the sport, especially for young fans, and yet they revealed almost no ambition.

By 1987, that was about to change. In 1988, Score became the fourth major card manufacturer, and its card back bios were full paragraphs, crammed with detail and expertise. "When Score first came out, I can remember their promotional stuff saying that card backs would be written by a Sports Illustrated writer," says Bruce Herman, who would later be Topps' head writer. Then in 1989, Upper Deck emerged as a high-quality competitor, and by the early 1990s, Topps and all the other brands established their own premium lines to go with their main sets. Then card companies added subsets, parallels and inserts, and each card had to have a back.

Phil Carter was the director of sports for Topps at the time. "At one point we had 25 cards of Cal Ripken in one year across all different products -- how many different things can I write about Cal Ripken that hadn't been said before?" He knew it would look cheap, pathetic even, to have the same one-line bio on 25 cards, so he turned the card back writing over to Herman, who would become perhaps the most read, most prolific baseball writer of the 1990s and 2000s. He has written, by his estimate, a quarter-million card backs, comprising 10 million words -- none of them credited. His card backs are often funny, often brilliant, often statistically advanced and always novel. In a dozen words he could perfectly, precisely capture a player's essence -- "[Will Clark] has called George Brett 'the only baseball player I admired'" -- and then do it again and again in new ways across a player's 15-year career.

But those literary card backs were just over the horizon. In 1987, Topps had to write only one card back per player per year, nobody expected these cards to be premium, competition for market share was still minimal and one of the primary goals of a card back bio was to not annoy the player (as when the wrong wife -- the ex-wife, not the new wife -- was named, and the player yelled at Topps for it). Phil Carter doesn't remember that Mattingly card back, but he remembers who would have written it. "When you started telling me about a birth date change, a smile came on my face," he says. "It would be reminiscent of one of my guys -- a gentleman named Bill Haber, in Brooklyn."

'Baseball's One-Man FBI'

Bill Haber wrote the card. Probably. From 1967 through the late 1980s, Haber wrote pretty much all of the cards.

Bill Haber is a legend, if not for his uncredited work on the cards. In 1971, he and 15 other baseball scholars founded the Society for American Baseball Research, the "SABR" from which sabermetrics would later take its name. "A very strong argument can be made that [Tom] Shea and Haber were baseball's greatest biographical researchers," a SABR journal from 2000 said. He was "baseball's one-man FBI," in the words of New York Daily News writer Bill Madden. He was a superstar on SABR's biographical committee, which has unearthed and corrected thousands of names, birth dates, death dates and other now-official (and now-accurate) records of historical ballplayers.

Haber's superpowers were persistence, creativity and the United States Postal Service. He would send letters to funeral homes and cemeteries, to ballplayers' descendants, to newspaper archivists and to public agencies -- along with the fees demanded for broad public records searches -- hunting for clues. Sometimes, he just needed to pin down a cause of death. Other times, it was up to him to unearth, nearly from scratch, the biographical data of players who might have appeared only in a game or two, perhaps under only a surname, perhaps under a fake surname. As Madden recounted in his tribute to Haber: "Most recently he solved a 100-year-old mystery involving a player listed in the record books only as John McGraw (not the legendary N.Y. Giants manager) who pitched in one game for Brooklyn of the Federal League in 1914. The only other information was that he was born in 1890. It took years of painstaking research for Haber to determine McGraw's real name was Roy Hoar which he changed to Heir and then played professional ball under the name McGraw so as not to lose his amateur status at Carnegie Tech. The final clues to Hoar's true identity were supplied by his two sons, whom Haber tracked down in California."

Everything he found would go to SABR's biographical committee, which would publish the new finds in its journal. The Baseball Encyclopedia, Retrosheet, the Baseball Almanac and other references would then make the corresponding changes in their records.

Haber also kept his own records. He had multiple index cards for every player who had ever played, Carter remembers: one for date of birth, one for cause of death, one for middle name and so on, all filed in long rows in his Brooklyn basement.

"I know that a lot of it stemmed from his interest in baseball cards," says Bill Carle, who runs the SABR biographical committee. "He had baseball cards back from the teens, and he was interested in making sure that the information was accurate on the guys he had baseball cards for. I think he probably originally got into it for his own curiosity, and then later on he knew that this served a larger purpose."

What, exactly, was that larger purpose?

"Well, I want to see accurate information," Carle says. "And it bothers me when something isn't accurate. If you look in the Baseball Encyclopedia and looked up Babe Ruth's 1927 and it said he hit 59 home runs, you'd go, 'How could they make this mistake? It's 60!' Well, I do the same thing with birth dates and death dates. We've had players, you look at it and discover they were supposedly 14 when they made their debut. I look at that and say that's wrong." Haber -- by all accounts a friendly man who loved to work in solitude -- agreed.

While Haber was writing those letters, enclosing $40 checks for public records searches, he was also in charge of the backs of Topps baseball cards. Most of his emphasis was on the stat tables, which he calculated and created himself, before computers. He'd disappear for the first few weeks of the offseason, make all the tables and deliver them to Topps for printing. He wrote the card back bios too, but he relied on official media guide information and generally kept them anodyne. It was safer to do it that way. The first rule was to do no harm: Annoy no ballplayers.

Haber died in 1995. His son, Marty Haber -- for a time locally famous as the Brooklyn Cyclones' on-field emcee Party Marty -- once boasted that "six people filled his position at Topps."

Haber's research emphasis was on early ballplayers, and it's unlikely he would have sleuthed for Mattingly's birth certificate as he had for Roy Hoar's. But what we do know about Haber is that he likely would have taken more interest in Mattingly's date of birth than the average baseball fan, writer or scholar would have. Birth dates were his thing. He would have been very interested in correcting the record if it were wrong and in clarifying a discrepancy if there were one. His work writing card backs for Topps might not have been as fun as his hobby of digging up historical inaccuracies for SABR, but with Don Mattingly's birth date, the two would have bumped against each other. Haber got a chance to correct a record.

But then, why would the 1988 Topps card have reverted to 1961 for his birth year? And why was the official record never changed? Was the card right? At this stage in the research, there were three guesses:

Carle, Haber's old partner at the biographical committee, guessed that Haber just made an error. It happens. Notes get transcribed wrong. Carle had an Indiana baseball expert on his committee -- who recently died -- and Carle figured if Mattingly's birthday had been wrong all this time, that guy would have definitely found and flagged it. So that was Carle's guess: "1962" was an error, made once.

Carter, Haber's old boss at Topps, speculated that Haber discovered the discrepancy somehow -- "That would be his thing" -- and put what he figured was the real date on Mattingly's card. And then, Carter's speculation continued, maybe Mattingly complained about the weird blurb to a Topps rep visiting the Yankees clubhouse, or maybe Mattingly's agent complained, or maybe the Yankees did. (The Yankees' PR director at the time, Harvey Greene, doesn't recall anything about this.) And since it was not just any player but Don Mattingly, and not just any team but the Yankees, maybe Carter would have just agreed, no big deal, to go back to the 1961 year. To be clear, he doesn't remember it that way; he could just imagine it going down like that. In Carter's theory, Haber could have been right, or Haber could have been wrong.

My guess was that Haber was right. Maybe Mattingly skipped a grade in elementary school, and when he entered the draft somebody just assumed he was 18 like the other seniors, not 17, and put the wrong date in. Probably Mattingly never told anybody the wrong year at all, but one person typed it in wrong one time. And once that was in baseball's official records, it got printed over and over again, in media guides and then media articles and then baseball cards, a mutation replicating. Mattingly tried -- he even showed the Yankees his birth certificate! -- but he couldn't get it changed. Classic modern problem: Hard to correct something once it's In The System. Topps briefly had it right. And then, by 1988, Topps forgot too and reverted back to the mutation.

Fine theories. None of them is what actually happened.

What Actually Happened

It was, ironically, only when we shifted our interest from Mattingly to Haber that the mystery cracked open.

After we interviewed Bill Carle about Haber's legacy and methods, Carle hung up the phone and started his own search. Using the same methods Haber had used -- but now modernized by the Internet -- Carle found a birth notice in an Evansville, Indiana, newspaper. Mr. and Mrs. William D. Mattingly, 505 Van Dusen, had given birth to a son, Donald Arthur.

The date on that newspaper: April 1961. Don Mattingly's birth date was definitely settled.

The mystery, though, was not. Are we supposed to believe that Bill Haber, a titan of baseball research, the 1985 Don Mattingly of baseball accuracy, just made this up? It's not, after all, just a birth date on that card back, an easy typo. It's a sentence, full of certainty and citing an actual government document: "Don's birth certificate states he was born in 1962, not 1961 as shown in most baseball records."

After his death, Haber's research notes were donated to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. I wondered what they looked like and whether there was an index card where he'd written Don Mattingly's birth date, so I reached out to Cassidy Lent, the manager of references services at the Hall's Giamatti Research Center. Long ago, Haber's notes were incorporated into the library's player files. It wouldn't be as simple as, say, opening up the Haber box. As a starting point, Lent suggested sending me their Don Mattingly file.

She scanned it and sent it in a PDF, 200 pages of clippings from Mattingly's career: His first ever paycheck (for $292); the scorecard for his first professional hit (attendance 2,954); a news release from his agent hinting at his imminent retirement; and hundreds of news articles from throughout his career, including -- 126 pages in -- a pair of articles that hadn't turned up in Lexis-Nexis searches.

The first one, from 1986:

That predates the writing of the 1987 Topps. It's a reasonable guess that Haber saw it, or saw another local paper with the same odd sidebar on the same day. With his keen interest in correcting the record of misstated ballplayer birth dates, it's a reasonable guess he jotted himself a note to put the correct date on Mattingly's next card. And then, a year later, Mattingly had another birthday, and some reporter remembered the funny detail from April 1986 and asked Mattingly about it again. That produced the Associated Press article I found earlier, from 1987, when Mattingly restated his 1962 birth date, declared again that the official record was wrong and claimed he had shown the Yankees his birth certificate to prove it.

But this time, the Hall of Fame folder goes on to show, Mattingly couldn't keep a straight face through the whole news cycle. A New York Daily News article, under the headline "The Hitman Comes Clean: I'm 26," gets Mattingly to reveal the plot: A year before, he had been in a terrible slump when his birthday arrived. Eleven games into the season he was slugging .267, still looking for his first extra-base hit, and reporters wouldn't stop asking him about it: "Every day, the same question. I was tired of answering the same question, so I changed the subject. I grabbed a writer and told him the book had me one year older than I was. And that became the story for the next few days. By the time that story died, I had a couple of extra-base hits and I didn't have to answer that question anymore."

The only victims, if there were any, were the reporters who put their byline above a hoax. And also the meticulous baseball researcher in Brooklyn who spent so much of his life dedicated to producing a pristinely accurate record of Major League Baseball history. For him, Mattingly's hoax survived as a slightly embarrassing mistake -- one moment of Bill Haber's remarkable career slightly askew, just like the pasted-on "62" on the back of that 1987 card.

But Mattingly's hoax is also a good story. It's a great story! Charismatic and confident Donnie Baseball was so frustrated by a slump, and so sensitive to public attention, that he created a nonsensical lie to distract us all from his struggles. And it worked. People believed it, or didn't know what to believe, while he hit three doubles the next day and went on to have another great season.

In some ways, the Don Mattingly hoax is a classic baseball story: small and quirky, worth only a brief mention on the inside pages of the day's sports section, but in time, a better and more significant tale than the news that made the cover. First it had to burrow into the soil, dormant and nearly forgotten. Decades passed, and time erased many of the original details. But other records survived, and technological progress made them accessible to a distant generation. Just enough of the truth hung on, waiting to be rediscovered and retold, until a great yarn of baseball history could be recounted. Ultimately, the record could be proved definitively -- in this case, all thanks to the one-sentence clue on the back of a now-worthless baseball card. That seems perfectly in line with what Bill Haber would have wanted.

Mark Arduini found a job doing analytics for an art museum. He has two packs left.

"I do think about the young women that have worked all their life to get to this stage. All they ever wanted was an opportunity to prove themselves."

The coronavirus pandemic has affected sport across the world, and women's sport is arguably one of the most at risk.

Fifpro, world football's players' union, recently warned that the women's game could be hit much harder by the virus than the men's - but Fifa will continue their $1bn [£805m] investment into the women's game'.

Athletes and administrators from a range of different sports spoke to BBC World Service for a special women's sport programme about the impact of Covid-19.

Football: 'We just assume women are doing the same as men'

Danish captain Pernille Harder is in Germany, where she plays as a striker for VfL Wolfsburg. The Women's European Championships have been moved back a year to 2022.

"In Germany, we are on week three of group training. It is mostly technical - touching the ball, seeing the girls, having a little bit of socialising.

"All the men's teams are already training in small groups but, on the women's side, I think it is only three or four teams who have started to practice in small groups.

"If we start playing at the same time as the men, some teams at the bottom will not have been out on the pitch as long as us, and that's not so good for them.

"It is mostly talking about the men's leagues in the media, and we just assume that the women are doing the same as the men.

"It is important that the sponsors do not cut women's football first."

Rugby Union: 'Women's World Cup a reminder of hope'

Charmaine McMenamin is a loose forward for the Black Ferns, who are the reigning world champions. New Zealand has been one of the most successful countries in containing the virus.

"A lot of the news we get here is about the US and Europe and how it's been hit, and I'm very thankful we have an awesome leader who acted quickly to minimise the damage.

"In terms of internationally, playing a game is still up in the air. I would be lying if I said the World Cup [which takes place in New Zealand in 2021] wasn't overshadowed by this.

"I know world rugby will really push for it because it will be a reminder of hope and that we did get through a tough time as a rugby community."

Catherine Spencer is a retired rugby union player. She captained England and won six Women's Six Nations titles.

"The decision was made quite early on to end the women's season, and at the moment, there are still talks about finishing the men's league.

"That's the stark reality of the difference in men's sport and women's sport. Men's rugby is based around TV coverage and everything that's linked to that, and the women's Premiership doesn't have the same broadcast deals.

"There's some teams like Waterloo and Richmond - the next announcement they heard was they had effectively been relegated from the Premiership.

"So for two teams in our Premiership, all the players and coaches involved, their season, and potentially their whole career in the Premiership, has come to an abrupt end."

Golf: 'All they ever wanted was an opportunity to prove themselves'

Mike Whan is the LGPA commissioner. The Tour is on hold until the majority of international players can compete.

"The financial impact is staggering but my mind is always on our rookies.

"When it started to escalate, I called all the rookies. I thought about these kids who have spent their whole lives trying to make it to this level.

"They finally did, and probably got sponsors that are tied to how often they play and how well, and here they sit.

"I do think about the young women that had worked all their life to get to this stage. All they ever wanted was an opportunity to prove themselves - and it's my job to give them that stage."

Cycling: 'I'm training without a goal'

Annemiek van Vleuten is the world road champion. The Dutchwoman has taken a pay cut to help her team, Mitchelton-Scott, with their finances.

"I can train with one person maximum. I try to focus on what I can control. Stay fit, stay healthy, stay happy and help where I can.

"I really miss working towards a goal with my team. I miss the competition.

"I was surprised because I also love to train but now I see that I really need the goals. It made me realise a lot of stuff you take for granted is not granted at the moment.

"I think this year it will be so hard to race in the peloton all over the world because countries are in different situations, and it makes it complicated."