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Think of one of the biggest criticisms of athletics in big-time college before the COVID-19 pandemic: Players are isolated from the student body, isolated in the athletics facility who spend more time on their sport than their size. Critics even used the word “bubble” to describe the world in which they lived.
Now for your weekly measure of coronavirus surrealism: A bubble is perhaps the only thing that saves college football.
Not by any strategic planning, mind you. It may be all that is left to try given the circumstances.
This week, three teams playing in the ACC this year (Notre Dame, North Carolina, NC State) sent students home or break person classes due to COVID-19 outbreaks.
That’s just a sample. UCLA has “drastically” reduced housing on campus because of the virus. The Chronicle of Higher Education counted 86 students at five schools detained for misconduct. Then there are the 300 faculty members in Georgia who called personal classes “uncertain.”
None of this directly affects football. Rather, it makes less and less bad optics.
What kind of message are these schools sending? If students are not safe on campus, how can football be played? It is the most intimate (100-plus players), physically demanding sport in collegiate athletics.
“You can not bring them into a bubble because they are students and they have to go to class,” former Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman told the Wall Street Journal.
A real bubble is not possible for college football, especially since teams will be traveling to play each other. There would always be open loops. Professional athletes can negotiate their working and test conditions. At some levels, college players still need the freedom to be students – socialize, see their families and friends … go to class.
Otherwise, they would be human shields – athletic mercenaries thrown out of there to achieve an economic goal. That can happen anyway. It depends on how you look at it.
In most schools, the loss of football revenue is a fraction of the potential impact on campus bottom line compared to the loss of tuition, housing and even parking.
“I’m constantly trying to make the point that this is not an athletic story,” said Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. “It’s about whether schools can successfully return to residential science education.”
At the moment, Swarbrick Notre Dame said “success in starting up backup” would have more impact on fall sports than anything else. The school has now been relocated to full online courses for at least two weeks amid a COVID-19 outbreak. The football team continues to practice.
Four months ago, conference commissioners told Vice President Mike Pence that there would be no football without students on campus. Then Swarbrick said, “It’s just hard to figure out how to say, ‘We believe the campus is not safe for our student body, and oh, we’ll bring one group of students back.'”
It was hard to figure out … until it was not.
Administrators quickly circumvented that edict with so-called ‘hybrid’ learning. If there are 10 biology students who absolutely must be on campus to conduct experiments, then a campus is not really closed, is it?
At its core, perhaps, the conflict comes down to a question of national emergency care itself. Doesn’t that statement alone suggest that cautious – even too cautious – is a sound policy?
Apparently not when it comes to football. The Big Ten and Pac-12 have pushed their decision early until January 2021. The SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Conference USA and have increased test protocols to try to avoid falling. Conference USA only canceled all fall sports except football. Why, you might ask, is football safe to play when no other sport is?
The University of Alabama has seen rates among students grow significantly, and personal events for students are 14-day breaks. Again, these personal events for students do not include football, which is also an event, a high contact, and a high income.
A video posted Thursday by the Baylor Lariat student newspaper even showed a massive gathering of students ignoring every piece of medical advice out there. “We will be online until September,” said one Baylor student.
We are now in the awkward position of judging whether playing college football is safer than going to college. Nobody knows that for sure. We only studied the coronavirus for a few months. Students are back on campus for a few days.
The implications of stopping person classes but continuing with football could be massive. A bubble can save the sport, but at that point, how else would the players actually look like employees? (Other than the lack of pay, of course.)
Not much else. Athletes would only have the thin appendix to the “student” section. As of now, the only reason these players are still on campus is football.
As long as everyone can see themselves in the mirror, that’s fine. The feeling here is that will not be possible. At least not for everyone. In fact, a lot of rationalization has already happened.
The cry of no students, no football has been lost for fear that no football means no money.
More and more often the mantra of April (the student-athlete is no. 1) is replaced by the requirements of August: football is no. 1.
Please do not act as you are surprised by any of these. The Next Big Hurd would be about the inevitable outbreaks on campus. Although they do not necessarily have to do with playing football, they are a reminder that the perception remains negative.
It reflects on the ability of each campus to control the spread as it is carried by 18- to 22-year-olds in the prime of their lives.
Or maybe that’s not even the discussion at all. Maybe students should not be blamed when it comes to playing the football season.
Maybe the blame goes to the presidents and ADs who thought they could pass this thing on. Those 76 remaining FBS schools are now almost the outlier in playing college football at every level this fall.
It also addresses the question: Just what do we do? The SEC has increased medical protocols; it and the Big 12 will test three times each week during the season.
Is it enough? Are the Big Ten and Pac-12 the Wise Here?
Remember when it used to be easy to find winners and losers in this sport.
