Let’s talk tests.
For college football to happen before a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available, everyone involved will have to be tested regularly. Sports of any kind are terrific transmission vectors for a virus that spreads via droplets, perhaps none more so than one where players are literally knocking the spit out of each others’ mouths.
The absolute minimum, I think, would be testing anyone involved once per week. That includes players, coaches, staff who are in the building, and trainers. Anyone who works on football and will be physically present with the principles will have to be tested at least that often.
I went through the 2019 rosters on each SEC team’s website and got an average of 115 players per team. That could be on the low side, since programs remove players from rosters when the leave or get medically disqualified. The 2019 UF roster doesn’t include Chris Bleich (left) or Noah Banks (medical DQ), for instance.
Teams have 11 on-field coaches, and then there’s a plethora of staff. The staff varies from one program to another, but I used a conservative figure of 26 since that’s what Vanderbilt has. The average SEC or Power 5 program is going to be out-hiring the comparatively penny-pinching Vandy on staff. Programs could cut this number a little by, for instance, having their graphics and video staff work from home, but we’re talking one to maybe four people here.
Then there are trainers. I don’t know offhand how many trainers there are in regular contact with a football team. I used a figure of ten after looking at the sideline of a game and estimating, but that’s a guess. There might be more who work with them during the week, or I could have the number too high.
In an interview last month, Dan Mullen said he thought the consensus was coaches wanting eight weeks of training to get players in physical shape for the season. He thought going as low as six could be feasible, so I went with six.
There have been a number of proposals for how the season may go. There has been talk of going as low as a ten-week season, and a typical season is 13 weeks (12 games plus an off week). I’m not even getting into conference championships and bowls here, which would make these figures go up.
With 115 players, 11 coaches, 26 staff, and ten trainers, that’s 162 people that need to be tested at least weekly. In a ten-week season, they’ll have to be tested 16 times for the preseason conditioning period and the season.
Add it up, and it comes out to 2,592 tests for one team over that time. For the 14-team SEC, it comes out to 36,288 tests. For the 65-team Power 5, it’s 168,480 tests in total.
For comparison, that’s about the number of tests that Hong Kong has conducted in the three months since mid-February. It’s just above what Utah has tested as of this writing yesterday morning, and 32 states that hadn’t run that many tests.
Looking at states is an imperfect comparison since we’re talking about 65 football programs across many states, and some states haven’t needed to run 168K tests due to their population sizes and relatively mild outbreaks in their borders. Still, I thought you might wonder, so I put those numbers there so you don’t have to look it up.
Now, what about a full 13-week regular season? The 162 people will have to be tested across 19 weeks now. The single-team count goes up to 3,078. The SEC count goes up to 43,092. The Power 5 count goes up to 200,070. Only 16 states have run at least 200,000 tests, and only 48 countries have done so (No. 48: the Philippines at about 215K). The same caveats about need apply to some countries as with states.
What about if it gets decided that teams need to be tested twice weekly to be safe? The Power 5 count goes up to 336,960 for a ten-week season and 400,140 for a 13-week season. We’re really getting into serious numbers here. Because the Power 5 makes up exactly half of the 130 FBS programs, these doubled numbers almost work for all of the top level of college football getting tested once weekly. Most Group of 5 programs have smaller staffs than do P5 schools, and they may keep fewer walk ons around (I haven’t run the numbers).
Teams could get their numbers down if need be in a number of ways. They can cut the number of walk ons and have more staff than just the video and graphics crew work remotely. However, there still are a number of people who’d need to be tested who aren’t getting captured by my estimates: seven on-field officials, four guys on the chains, the staff who keep track of all the footballs, emergency personnel, the TV crew, and so on.
Is it feasible to run that many tests just to facilitate college football? It’s still hard to say.
Progress continues for the testing game. The FDA just approved the first at-home sample collection kit, though the sample still has to go to a lab with results coming back in three-to-five days ideally. There will be more advances in each aspect of testing, though we can’t predict when they’ll happen.
There still is a lot we don’t know about how the virus works, too. For instance the USS Theodore Roosevelt has had 13 sailors who A) tested positive for COVID-19, B) went through a month of isolation or quarantine, and C) tested negative twice who have since tested positive again. Why is this happening? There’s no answer yet.
Then there’s the logistics of running that many tests. Michigan is still dealing with backlog issues. AdventHealth has determined over 32,000 people in Florida are affected by a third-party lab that was too slow and had unreliable results for its tests. There are still months before football season to work out these kinds of problems, but they still exist now.
And then there’s the question of whether this many tests should be used for the cause of college sports. In order for society as a whole to function better before a ubiquitous vaccine comes around, and that’s probably still at least a year away, there will need to be a lot more testing of the general population than is happening now. Test, trace, and isolate is the winning strategy, and it relies on the first of those to inform the other two.
Will we be at a point by September or October where more than 100,000 tests per month month can justifiably be spent just for FBS football, to say nothing about lower divisions or other collegiate sports? I don’t know. I sincerely hope the answer is “yes”, not just because I want to see football happen but also because that means we’re able to test everyone at levels that’ll truly allow people to get back to a significant portion of their pre-pandemic lives with confidence.
It’s going to be a complicated thing to get football to happen later this year. I hope this has given you an idea of what kinds of testing capacity we’ll need to see in order for it to go forward.