NCAA is `showing utter disregard' for student safety
Hard to believe organization created to protect athletes, says Kevin B. Blackistone.
You know what the irony is, in this awful 2020, about the NCAA? It is that the organization was formed to protect the health and ensure the safety of college athletes. But that's so 1900s.
To be sure, as coronavirus cases in the U.S. soared into the eight figures, the college basketball season — demanding long-distance travel, indoor games and close contact, all factors that contribute to the virus's spread — tipped off. Pandemic be damned.
And as one would expect, players, coaches and staff started testing positive for the virus, which has killed around 300,000 people in the U.S.
So many red flags popped up among basketball teams that games were cancelled or postponed the first week and every week since, dozens in all.
All of which led perhaps the game's most venerated team, the Duke Blue Devils, on Thursday to announce it “will forgo its remaining non-conference regular season basketball games for the 2020-21 season ... out of an abundance of caution due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” The announcement came days after celebrated coach Mike Krzyzewski seemed to question the wisdom of playing games at all.
“I don't think it feels right to anybody,” Krzyzewski said Tuesday in his post-game news conference. “... It wasn't, like, wellplanned that we're going to start Nov. 25. That was made without knowing (where) the vaccine was, how many cases. Basically, it was more of a mentality of, get as many games in as possible. And I think I would just like — for the safety, the mental health and the physical health of our players and staff — to assess where we're at.”
Never before have those who govern college athletics, or who have the gravitas to influence that authority — with Krzyzewski, also on faculty at Duke's Center of Leadership and Ethics, one notable exception — seemed more smarmy. Never before has the multibillion-dollar college athletics' industrial complex revealed itself more exploitative of its labourers than with college campuses all but shuttered save the two sports — basketball and football — that produce the revenue that funds the NCAA and makes conference commissioners, athletic directors and coaches multimillionaires.
“When you have schools ... move all their students' classes to Zoom, shut down most of their intercollegiate sports, but continue to operate revenue-generating men's basketball, to me that is not just a risky choice,” Fordham Law School professor Marc Edelman told me by phone Friday. “That is showing utter disregard for the well-being of a small subset of the student population.”
He joined three other academics, adding his legal expertise to a soon-to-be-published Michigan State Law Review article titled “Exploring College Sports in the Time of COVID-19: a Legal, Medical, and Ethical Analysis.” The critique of the NCAA focuses almost solely on its financial exploitation of athletic labour.
College sports is bereft of leadership in 2020, save a handful of folks like Krzyzewski and Duke president Vincent Price.
Their school sounded the alarm in March, as the virus morphed into a pandemic, when it stopped participating in all athletic competitions. Only the leaders of the eight-school Ivy League and Maryland Eastern Shore and Bethune-cookman have refused to put their athletes at risk by cancelling their seasons. But the pushers who profit from the physical exploitation of college athletes aren't about to stop.