Even in Texas, is football worth putting lives at risk?
The novel coronavirus pandemic may have forced a shutdown this spring, but universities across the state are feeling more confident that there will be students on campus this fall.
They are talking about bringing students to campus as scheduled.
As you might have imagined, discussion of when the football season might start wasn’t too far behind.
Actually, this being Texas and all, football is as much a part of the conversation as classes for some.
The sport is that important at these institutions of higher learning and tackling.
On Thursday, University of Houston president Renu Khator told faculty and staff in an email that UH would reopen in four stages. Research operations. Low-touch, low-risk administrative operations.
All operations and athlet
ics.
Classroom instruction. The easy joke would be to ask why athletics rank above classroom instruction on such a list.
It is even easier to crack wise and ask why Khator did not include UH football in the “low-touch, low-risk” category.
I mean, did you see Dana Holgorsen’s defense last season? The Cougars began flattening the coronavirus curve with social distancing way back in September.
Don’t cringe. If we’re going to bring college football back, silly jokes are part of the deal, right?
Feel free to insert your own target, because if we use 6 feet apart as a safe distance, defensive units in Austin and Lubbock also would face minimal risk of contracting the virus if they played as they did last fall.
A not-so-funny question: Is the game worth the risk?
Students being educated on campus without football? If that were OK, we wouldn’t have 100,000-seat stadiums.
Will precautions taken in
classrooms translate into safe football?
Obviously, testing is crucial in not only determining how safe it would be for players to take the field, but whether fans could attend.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, said Thursday on “The Today Show” that millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine could be available by early next year.
But he is very cautions when it comes to predicting when the return to full-scale sports would be wise.
“Safety, for the players and for the fans, trumps everything,” Fauci told the New York Times on Tuesday. “If you can’t guarantee safety, then unfortunately you’re going to have to bite the bullet and say, ‘We may have to go without this sport for this season.’ ”
It seems colleges are determined to play games this coming school year, even if it means changing the seasons, with football starting in January instead of September.
Right now, the idea of large crowds is reason for pause.
Chuck Carlton of the Dallas Morning News posted comments from a Sirius XM radio interview with Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby, where he pointed to the Texas-Oklahoma rivalry game at the State Fairgrounds in Dallas as potentially problematic during a pandemic.
“When you think about a Petri dish for spreading infection, can you think of one that’s better than the State Fair of Texas?” Bowlsby said. “People are jammed in there, and they’re enthusiastic. It’s about a perfect place to transmit any kind of infection.”
The vitriol spewed in online discussions about any coronavirus adjustment to the Texas-OU game is not surprising. The rivalry is that important. But is football?
I do wonder if there would have been the same anger had there been social media in 1918.
World War I had taken away so many athletes that the Southwest Conference allowed freshmen to play football. But the season was put on pause because of the Spanish flu.
An Austin city ordinance issued in October that year prevented public gatherings for 30 days.
The Texas-OU game, which didn’t move permanently to Dallas until 1929, was canceled.
The Longhorns continued to practice, though. Their official results list a couple of substitute games against Penn Radio School from South Austin.
No fans were allowed to attend those games, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Regular games resumed in November, and the Longhorns finished that season with a 9-0 mark, ending the year with a 7-0 win over Texas A&M on Thanksgiving.
A week and a half later, Joe Spence, a starting guard for the Longhorns, died.
Spence died of the Spanish flu, not football.
But the sport was so important that the games went on despite the pandemic.
More than 100 years later, is it still that important to us?