Boo Corrigan: ‘Every effort was made to fight for the best interests of our program’

As NC State fans were just absorbing the news out of Omaha on Saturday morning, athletics director Boo Corrigan released a brief statement that was, um, not well received. I don’t think the reaction was fair to Boo, but everybody was confused and angry and wanted to see at least a bit of militancy in the response from NC State’s leadership. I get it. (Debbie Yow was great at this.)

Anyway, Corrigan released an expanded statement this evening that was clearly an effort to meet that anger half way.

What transpired over the last 36 hours, and especially since midnight last night, has been hard to comprehend and even much more difficult to accept. Every step of the way we fought exhaustively for our players, coaches and staff and program, and for the opportunity to play for the national championship this team has worked so hard to reach. But at the end of the day, several of our players tested positive for COVID and we were not allowed to continue playing. While we can’t discuss publicly everything that transpired, please know every effort was made to fight for the best interests of our program.

All day today, we have been trying to make sense of this with the NCAA while organizing travel to get our student-athletes, coaches and staff home safely.

Corrigan confirms that several previously vaccinated players tested positive—regardless of the protocols, once the NCAA decided to test everybody on the team and found those positives, it determined the team’s roster situation untenable.

Corrigan also notes that the vaccine wasn’t available prior to the start of the season and that some players wanted to wait until after to get the shots out of fear of the side effects. Those fears are silly and anyway could easily have been managed (get your shots mid-week!) if the athletics department were really committed to getting everyone vaccinated, but I digress.

This is going to be the extent of the details we get on this ordeal, at least in an official capacity. We will never hear from the NCAA on this and the timeline for the whole thing will never be clear. For all the ways that horseshit organization could have fucked things up here, there was an obvious way to never risk that particular exposure in the first place, and NC State declined to take it.

I’m not sure exactly when I’ll get over the events of the last couple days, but I’m tentatively aiming for somewhere in 2026.