White House Offered Rapid COVID-19 Tests To The Big Ten

With the Big Ten announcing earlier this week that it is going to resume playing games on Oct. 24, It was rumored that they had received assistance from President Donald Trump and his administration by making available rapid test kits that the United States government had just purchased. On Thursday, reports were confirmed that the Trump administration offered these kits to the conference, but it had gotten them through a private vendor.

Trump has been a vocal advocate for the return of sports, especially Big Ten Football, over the past few months. He reportedly had a conference call with the Big Ten presidents a few weeks ago during which he put pressure on the conference to find a way to return. “I called the commissioner a couple of weeks ago, and we started putting a lot of pressure on, frankly, because there was no reason for it not to come back,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

With the league scheduled to resume games in October, it appears that the president is taking a sort of victory lap that he has spurred major conference play to resume. It is still yet to be seen whether this will be a good thing for his image or a stain on it depending on how it goes with athlete testing and if outbreaks can be contained. “I’m really proud of it because it was dead,” Trump told Clay Travis on Fox Sports Radio. “It was totally dead, and I told my people, ‘Look, we’ve got to call.’ I said: ‘Who am I going to call? Who’s the head of it?’ And it was [Big Ten Commissioner] Kevin Warren, who really turned out to be very open about it.”