The SEC had what was supposed to be a confidential conference call with the SEC Football Student-Athlete Leadership Council about the league’s plans to have a football season despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, and other outlets such as CBS Sports covered it as well.
Robert Klemko and Emily Giambalvo wrote the Post‘s story in a way that it comes off as a gotcha kind of piece. Some of it could be more benign than portrayed. An example would be an unidentified SEC official who said, “There are going to be outbreaks. We’re going to have positive cases on every single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it.”
That is true. I haven’t counted for sure, but at least several conference members have had players test positive already. Many states in the footprint have had more than 1% of their populations test positive for the disease already. College football rosters, when including walk ons, tend to go above 100 people. So, if you take any random sample of 100 people in a lot of SEC states, there’s a good chance that someone in it will have tested positive. Even more so considering that children, especially younger ones, aren’t getting tested that often, so the incidence of positive tests among people 18+ years of age should be above the state’s overall percentage.
There also is the matter that implementing an NBA-style bubble is not feasible, at least as long as NCAA members have to perpetuate the fiction that athletes are no different than other students. Some number of players will go to house parties, nightclubs, or even just the dorms of non-athletes, and they could catch the virus in any of those situations. No one believes he is an exception to all rules as strongly as an 18-22 year-old male. I know; I was one once.
The end of the Post‘s article was most telling to me. When this particular statement happened in the call is not clear, but it was the capper on the writeup.
During the call, [Greg] Sankey, the commissioner, also relayed a conversation he had with his two daughters about how they should continue their lives during this pandemic by taking personal responsibility and encouraging others to do the same.
“My advice is you’re going to have to go live your life in this environment,” the commissioner said. “I think that’s the challenge that we’re trying to meet.”
There are two phrases with loaded meaning in there.
One is “personal responsibility”. It’s a phrase thrown around a lot in politics, and it has specific connotations in that arena. It’s not just used to talk about how individuals should take the initiative when confronting certain issues in life without waiting on the authorities (i.e. the government) to address them, its usage implies the normative value that people shouldn’t expect the authorities to address that issue.
I don’t know if Sankey meant to use it in that way, but it’s hard not to hear it considering that he is the highest authority figure here.
The other phrase is “live your life”. Since the COVID-19 pandemic set in, it too has acquired extra meaning beyond the surface content of the words. The most common way I’ve heard it employed is something along the lines of: “yes, take precautions, be smart and prudent, but at some point you have to live your life.”
In other words, it’s a call to have people not stay closed up in their residences all the time and be afraid of the disease. I’ve heard it used in ways genuine, out of a concern for a person’s mental health if they never leave home, and insincere, as a way of dismissing well-founded concern.
I don’t know Sankey and I wasn’t on the call, but I’m more sure of him using the “live your life” phrase in this way than “personal responsibility” as I described above. It’s a stock phrase of the pandemic, one that was not commonly thrown around prior to March 2020. It makes him come off as a bit callous to me, like he’s trying to deploy the genuine usage I just described while also trying to convince the players to participate in a sport that generates hundreds of millions of dollars without them getting any extra compensation for the risk.
The SEC put out a statement saying that the players “expressed appreciation for the honest dialogue, indicated the discussion was beneficial and requested a similar videoconference in the future”. I’ll be watching to see if the conference can fulfill the athletes’ expectations.
At the very least, the SEC has incentive to work hard at it considering what a group of Pac-12 players published yesterday. Claiming to speak for some or all of the conference’s athletes — it’s not 100% clear whether they mean to claim all, and some players have already spoke publicly about not agreeing to all of it — the group published a statement of purpose and a list of demands (their word).
Some of them aren’t realistic, such as the demand for schools to use endowment funds to keep schools from dropping sports. Donations generally have to go to the purpose they were given for, and in the case of endowments, that would be academics. The authors single out Stanford for having recently dropped some sports, but I would bet the school literally can’t use any endowment money on athletics without running afoul of laws about charitable giving. If/when this group of athletes gets some legal representation for the negotiation they appear to want to have, this kind of issue will get ironed out.
A number of other demands could conceivably happen, and they would represent a dramatic shakeup of how the business of college sports is done. The authors explicitly invited the athletes of other conferences to make an alliance with them, so a call has gone out beyond the west coast.
I don’t know if any SEC athletes will join in, but I’m sure this manifesto has already gone around the league office. The stakes are clear: satisfy your athletes’ concerns on your own terms or risk watching them join up with this other group that has made some pretty striking demands. The ball is in Birmingham’s court. Let’s see what they do with it.