Players safer at football facilities

If it is not safe enough to play college football, is it safe enough for fellow children on the campus of their school?

It’s definitely something Alabama coach Nick Saban has been thinking about, especially since the Big Ten could move as soon as this week to not let football play this fall. University leaders across the country are worried about how coronavirus cases will spread if students are on campus in the coming weeks and if the coronavirus pandemic makes football possible.

Football programs have implemented social distance measures over their facilities and tested procedures for their players as a way to keep them safe. So safe, Saban told ESPN, that they were safer with the football team than they were anywhere else.

From ESPN:

“We also test anyone who has symptoms and has an open test site where they can go and be tested as many times as they want or any time they feel like they should,” Saban said. “But our boys will not catch it [the virus] on the football field. They will catch it on campus. The argument would then probably be, ‘We should not have a school.’ That is the argument. Why is it, ‘We should not have to play football?’ Why has that become the argument? “

Saban’s point is a decent point. The fears of players catching the coronavirus stem from the places they will go and people they would hang out with outside the football facility, and the lack of social distance and mask-wearing of those activities would mean. It’s not because football programs do not take many extra steps to keep players safe when doing football-related activities. Pushing to cancel or suspend the college football season is a stalemate that campuses and college towns are ripe for the spread of the coronavirus with or without sports.

And the NCAA and its member schools have placed themselves in a position where they can not go to even more extraordinary lengths to have football and other fall sports in the fall. A bubble scenario similar to the NBA’s experiment as an NHL would not work because it would require schools to treat athletes much differently than other students. And schools have long argued that athletes are just like other students.

Schools have also claimed that athletes have been amateurs for a long time as well. Numerous FCS conferences have already stated that they will not be playing fall sports this year and the NCAAs Division II and Division III have now stated that they will not be holding fall sports championships. Those decisions were made for the sake of health and safety and because they are not an enormous source of income as great college football is.

College football is the sport that brings schools and conferences the most television money and throws up their athletic budgets. Athletic divisions run largely on the money that football provides. Therefore, serious discussions about postponing the football season so far have not occurred in Power Five conferences, although the SEC certainly seems to be waiting a bit longer to make a decision about its football season.

Commissioner Greg Sankey tweeted Monday that the conference was going to wait to make a decision. The league had previously announced that it would not begin its conference-only schedule until September 26 to see how coronavirus cases across the conference would trend after students arrived on campus.