The more time goes on, the more information we get about what college sports might look like in the fall. Increasingly, it appears that “united” or “uniform across conferences” is not going to be among the descriptors.
I will call your attention to an article from longtime college football reporter Brett McMurphy that ran last Thursday. It catalogs how some conference commissioners’ tunes have been changing as time goes along.
For instance, the FBS commissioners were united a month ago on the proposition that students must be on campus in order to have sports. The SEC’s Greg Sankey softened that stance at the tail end of April, allowing that maybe some students would be on campus while others could be taking all online courses. McMurphy’s article now quotes the Big 12’s Bob Bowlsby allowing that online-only classes would qualify in his mind for restarting sports.
Now, we can’t get too far ahead of ourselves on that one quote. The ACC’s John Swofford and AAC’s Mike Aresco were less willing to back that proposition without backup from their university presidents, and the Pac-12’s Larry Scott thought it a bad idea to have campuses where the only students present are athletes.
Scott I think is onto something there. Optics do matter, and it’s not a good look to have solely athletes on campus. If it’s safe for them, how is it not safe for anyone else? And the converse: if it’s not safe for any of the rest of the student body, how could it be safe for the athletes? Such a situation would cause the “college athletes are exploited” cause to go nuclear, and not entirely without reason.
What Scott deemed a “hybrid” approach of having some in-person instruction with a lot of online classwork is more feasible in my mind. I think a lot of institutes of higher education, whether they sponsor sports or not, will go to that kind of model.
It certainly isn’t a settled issue yet. McMurphy granted anonymity to a P5 and a G5 athletic director to get their unvarnished thoughts. The P5 AD passionately argued in favor of the idea of holding sports even if no one is on campus except the athletes on the idea that the more empty campus is, the safer it will be. The G5 AD was entirely against it for the reasons I described above about optics.
All of the commissioners who responded, and Sankey was among the three who didn’t, said that university presidents will make the final call. Expect to hear that a lot. After all, they are technically the bosses who hire and fire commissioners, even if they prefer to follow their commissioners’ lead in a lot of areas.
UF Health put out an explainer on what it’s doing to try to help get campus back open, and I think it’s instructive. I would encourage you to read it yourself since I am not an expert in public health in the way they are, but I will summarize a couple of key points here.
First, they are working to set up a contact tracing system. That’s terrific news, and it’s something you want to hear from any authority right now. There is a middle path between endless lockdowns and dangerous reopening: test, trace, and isolate.
Test as many people as you can. Trace their contacts, meaning try to figure out who they’ve had in-person interactions with in the time since they’ve been contagious, and test those people. Quarantine people who’ve tested positive for about two weeks so they don’t spread the virus further.
I’ll quote from the article here: “One study shows that if 20% or more of the contacts of a symptomatic person are traced and put into quarantine, then an epidemic can be controlled and the chances of a ‘second wave’ can be reduced significantly.” What study, by whom and when? I don’t know. There’s no citation. I trust they wouldn’t put something like that in the piece if it was bunk, but the thorough researcher in me can’t help but note that.
As UF Health itself says, these methods alone won’t snuff out the virus. There will still need to be social distancing, reduced numbers of people on campus, and potentially stronger restrictions if numbers rise too much. I suspect that for the fall and perhaps longer, anyone who can take all of their classes online will be instructed to do so.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some kind of mask-wearing mandate will be put in place, if for no other reason than to try to eliminate the stigma of mask-wearing for people who are sick. There still seems to be some disagreement about the efficacy of wearing masks below the level of an N95 respirator, but it does appear that a sick person wearing one will not spread whatever they’ve got as much. At the very least, wearing a mask keeps you from touching your nose or mouth.
The more time goes on, and the more information we get, the more targeted plans start to become. A month ago, broad statements were appropriate because we didn’t know enough to get specific. As far as college sports go, the financial necessity of football becomes more real the closer the fall gets. I’m not surprised that conference commissioners, as they do in McMurphy’s piece, are allowing for more scenarios in which sports get played, including on campuses that are online-only or when most but not all conference members are able to play.
It’s going to be a fragmented fall. Some will do well. Others, poorly. I can say this much: UF Health appears to be making some smart plans now to facilitate things in the future. Let’s hope other universities have as good a health leadership as Florida does.