Sir Yacht Was (Kind of) Right

This pandemic has caused 2020 to drag on more than needed. March feels like it was six years ago instead of the six months it’s been. The longest point these past six months has been August 11, when the Big Ten decided to cancel football, until Wednesday morning, when they decided to try playing. The Big Ten not playing this fall lasted just over a month, but for Husker fans it was a lifetime.

Even though football was gone and it didn’t seem like there was an end in sight, I had hope. I gained that hope from Sir Yacht. For those not on Twitter, or those living under a rock, a Twitter user that goes by Sir Yacht has been adamant Big Ten football was coming back this fall in October.

At first everybody, including myself, was extremely skeptical of him because he’s just some random guy on Twitter saying he has a source.

After a few days of seeing his tweets get RT onto my timeline I decided to follow him. While I was still skeptical of him I decided to scour the internet to see if there was anything from credible journalists that would point to the same things he was saying. One of the other sources my friends and I found was a guy by the name of Jeff Snook. He seemed to have some inside information about the Ohio State athletic department, and some of his posts on Facebook alluded to direct contact with Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith.

From my understanding Jeff Snook was one of the first people to break the story about former Ohio State WR coach Zach Smith. Once I started looking through Snook’s posts I started getting more hopeful that Sir Yacht was on to something. I was still very skeptical this random guy knew more information than all of us, but he did tweet something that peaked my interest on August 15.

At this point I thought he was trolling completely. There was no way a random guy knew that the White House was getting involved in college athletics like this. I’m not trying to start a political discussion in the comments, but everybody saw this next tweet.

Love or hate the current administration it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Sir Yacht tweeted the White House was getting involved two weeks before Donald Trump tweeted about it. Personally, there’s no way Donald Trump would’ve tweeted that after one meeting with Kevin Warren and the rest of the conference. There’s a good chance the White House did get involved right away. By the time Trump sent that tweet out I was in full “ride or die with the Yacht” mode. University of Nebraska President Ted Carter followed Sir Yacht on August 18, and I confirmed myself that it was the real Ted Carter not some account that looks the same.

Originally he was reporting six Big Ten schools would play a 10 game home-and-home schedule with each other. We know this turned out to be false, but the narrative is what’s important. The narrative of Nebraska and Ohio State fighting for a season is what gave me hope. Clay Travis also put out a story that six Big Ten teams were fighting for a home-and-home series for this season.

Travis also tweeted Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was a major obstacle for the Big Ten. It seems like the idea of any Big Ten football was being shut down because of her and University of Michigan’s President.

Around this time pressure from parents was starting to mount and a lawsuit was filed by eight Nebraska football players on August 27. In my opinion this was the major turning point in the Big Ten returning to play yet this fall. Low and behold, on the same day Sir Yacht reported that talks were ongoing to restart the football season.

Over the next few days more sources came out saying they believe the Big Ten is going to reverse course and play near Thanksgiving.

Sir Yacht was adamant that the Big Ten wasn’t going to play football at Thanksgiving, it was either October or bust. From my perspective it seems like that was because he’s from Ohio, and his source is probably connected to the Ohio State athletic department, and Ohio State wanted to compete for the College Football Playoff.

As the days and weeks went on, more information came out about a potential Big Ten season in October. Back in August Sire Yacht reported about one option for the Big Ten.

Sir Yacht also reported about the vote that supposedly too place to postpone the season. I don’t know if anybody believed there was actually a vote taken. Sir Yacht “confirmed” the vote was bogus.

The lawsuit that was filed by Nebraska players demanded the Big Ten release information as to why the season was canceled and they wanted to know the vote. The 11-3 vote is what the Big Ten came out and said about the original decision, but since there were conflicting reports as to whether the vote actually happened it was hard to believe. In my opinion, the Big Ten was scrambling at this point to get back on the field. Considering other conferences had announced they were getting ready to play and they were getting sued it made more sense for the conference to play as soon as possible.

A few weeks ago Sir Yacht said Big Ten football would be back October 10. Obviously we know now this is wrong, but I believe his source was telling him October 10 because Ohio State was pushing that as a start date.

The same day, just a few minutes before, Dan Patrick said on his show the Big Ten might be coming back October 10.

The situation of Covid at other Big Ten schools and the safety measures not being passed is were the reasons for the start date to be pushed to October 24th. During the same time frame of Sir Yacht’s original story about the Big Ten coming back on October 10, he revealed even more about the Big Ten needing Michigan to sign off on playing. A big step towards that was when Gov. Whitmer allowed organized sports to resume in the fall.

Later on September 3, some parents of Ohio State players were tweeting out about a potential vote on September 4.

In my opinion, it’s pretty clear Ohio State and people associated closely with Ohio State were convinced the season was coming back or at the very least the decision to cancel was being revisited.

When no word on a vote to reinstate the season came on September 4, it seemed like a lost cause and there wasn’t enough support to overturn the initial decision. My hope returned on September 6.

This vote never happened on Tuesday September 8 and we were all left wondering what is going on. Dave Biddle, editor of Bucknuts on 247Sports also reported there would be a vote on September 8, so what happened?

Some Big Ten Presidents didn’t want to play and some probably still don’t want to play were holding up the progress of the rest of the conference.

The next day on September 10, Ryan Day started to put pressure on the Big Ten Presidents to make a decision on a football season.

After another day, Sir Yacht stated the season would resume on Monday September 14.

It seems like the “more details being discussed” caused the Big Ten to push back the date even further. By this point, national media had started reporting some of the same things Sir Yacht had been putting out there. Originally, it seemed like only a handful of schools were going to play. I don’t know what changed, but everybody is playing today.

One of the reasons for delay could have been Kevin Warren trying to get all 14 teams to play football this fall. It also could be because some schools wouldn’t be able to start preparing for a few weeks because of the current number of cases on campus/cities.

We know the season will not start on the 10th or the 17th, but I believe both Nebraska and Ohio State wanted one of those start dates. As we saw in August, the Big Ten seems to make decisions for every school in the conference. If every team can’t start on October 10, then the Big Ten probably wasn’t going to start that weekend and give some teams a bye.

From here we know what happened. Ted Carter was caught on the hot mic, and then we had to wait an agonizing 24 hours for the Big Ten to officially announce the return of Husker football this fall.

Sir Yacht was not 100 percent correct, but his narrative was.

The point of this article was not to pick and choose tweets that were correct, it was to show the narrative of the Big Ten and how returning to play started almost immediately. One more tweet that is important to this whole story, from our very own Ryan Held.

A lone YouTube link. The Boys of Fall. This tweet came in the evening on the first day the Big Ten was supposed to announce an October start date. I may be reading into this too much, but I think he was hinting that football in Nebraska would be returning this fall. We just needed to wait a bit longer.

I want to know your thoughts, was Sir Yacht right?