Big Ten and Pac-12 leaders had the courage to exercise a rare American trait: Caution
To their everlasting credit, college presidents in the Big Ten and Pac-12 have hit the pause button on the season, and the rest of the Power Five conferences should, too. It’s the only responsible choice amid so many unknowns: to take a collective knee and defer while campuses gauge the impact of reopening and doctors learn more about the threat of myocarditis and other complications from this disease.
No doubt some outraged folks will rebel — folks who have never shown much inclination to put anybody’s health above wins and losses. Never forget, Maryland couldn’t save a kid from dying during offseason sprints, and Notre Dame once sent a student videographer to his death up a lift-tower in 50-mph winds just to film a football practice. You can see the same sensibility at work in this pandemic — from office seekers as well as profit seekers.
Of course everyone wants a season, and the pleas of competitors such as Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence make the hearts of all college football enthusiasts pang. But politicians are co-opting that emotion, casting anyone in Lawrence’s path as a snowflake, so they can hide their incompetence amid a roaring culture war. They’ll seize on Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh’s open letter arguing for a season based on the fact that his team had just 11 positive tests out of 893 during summer conditioning and call caution timidity.
But it’s important to recognize one thing. Those summer workouts took place in a very small and controlled bubble — and that bubble is about to burst in a very big way. There are 16.9 million undergraduates in this country, many of whom will begin flooding local dorms and taverns and doing as students have ever done, breaking rules. Michigan has more than 30,000 undergrads and 4,600 faculty.
That’s the real issue here. Big Ten and Pac-12 officials didn’t postpone because they’re hesitant or weak. They did the math.
Michigan President Mark Schlissel is an immunologist. He knows what he’s looking at. He’s trying to safely reopen a massive campus despite limited ability to test and contact trace thousands of 18- to 21-year-olds with loose habits and car keys. Here are just some of the questions he would have had to consider if the Big Ten season went forward, questions that should preoccupy every athletic director and university president in the SEC, ACC and Big 12:
Do you divert limited testing resources to football players when you can’t regularly test and protect their fellow students the same way?
What are the mathematical odds that a contact sport among universities with large undergrad populations can be played without people getting exposed and carrying the infection back to another campus?
Do you give football players safety bubbles and other protocols not available to others? Do you quarantine them after every trip?
What will infection rates look like in communal living?
What’s the capacity of the university’s health system, and how quickly might it be overrun if there’s an outbreak?
What do you tell aged professors who are high risk and don’t want to teach athletes who might expose them?
Will football watch parties tempt students to gather in large groups and disregard distancing and wearing masks?
Are you prepared to deal with athletes who develop cardiac issues — studies show that as many as 20 percent of those who recover from covid-19 show heart abnormalities — and do you have medical resources to manage regular electrocardiograms, heart ultrasounds and MRI exams to monitor for myocarditis and prevent more serious complications?
The Big Ten and Pac-12 chose a perfectly reasonable alternate scenario to plunging ahead with contact sports in the face of unknowables: just a few more months of care, deliberation and discretion. These qualities are hardly championed lately in this country, but campus leaders who had the courage to exercise them will get a realistic picture of the risk-reward of in-person classes, and more information about the effect of cooler temperatures on the virus and viral loads. And there is every chance that they will pay a lighter price because of it.
Those pressing on, such as the SEC and the Clemson- and Notre Dame-led ACC, are flying partly blind into unknowns and asking for compounded trouble. Maybe Alabama’s Nick Saban has some insight that medical scientists don’t. Maybe Clemson’s trainers know more than Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who predicts this fall will be “probably one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.” After all, look at how well football schools have historically done with concussions, sexual assaults and heatstroke fatalities. They aced those medical-moral tests. Why not this one?
The people who insist on playing this fall are simply putting up straw men. Saban argued Monday that the season should go forward by saying, “Look, the players are a lot safer with us than they are running around at home.” But who says they would all be sent home? Why wouldn’t they be with their peers, simply going to fall semester classes and continuing to condition? Or is mere classwork not worth the risk of exposure? Is that what he just said?
University leaders have some complicated and maybe even desperate calculus to do as they weigh the risks of on-field play, the trade-off of health hazard vs. athletic department debt, not to mention external pressure from donors and pols. The many benefits of college football, starting with its capacity to bring joy, are legitimate, and no one could possibly be happy with these postponements.
But institutions that have been willing to err on the side of caution in this unprecedented pandemic don’t regret it. The NBA went with a hard shutdown followed by a bubble, and it worked. So did the NHL. What those examples prove is that caution — slow, organized, considered, informed policy — is the only reliable route to a sustainable reopening.
