Kicking off college football won’t be easy
NCAA official details steps that are needed
Two weeks from the date some college athletics departments are targeting for allowing athletes to start returning to campus for team workouts, NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline on Friday night provided an extensive, unvarnished look at what schools are facing as they try to get sports — especially football — going again.
Speaking during a live interview on
an NCAA Twitter site, Hainline described a world that shows much more promise regarding testing for COVID-19 than the one that existed when the sports world shut down in early March, but one in which the current reality remains that it may not take more than a few positive tests to shut down an entire team for 14 days.
For that to change, Hainline said, schools would have to be in a position to test athletes every one to five days and the medical/scientific community would need to have a sufficient understanding of how the virus works to establish five-day quarantine periods.
How any, or all, of this ultimately works for any individual school presumably will be determined by state, local and school officials.
But based on the NCAA's current return-to-play guidelines, Hainline's comments mean that it would be recommended that athletes not even share footballs for at least four weeks after activities resume, although he was not asked whether wearing gloves or attempting to sanitize footballs would mitigate that. Then there would be the additional, well-understood risk from all of the sport's close contact.
For some members of coaching staffs, Hainline said this might suggest they initially stay away from the team, and then wear a mask and maintain more distance from players and other coaches than they usually have.
Meanwhile, athletes and coaches in winter and spring sports would do well to pay close attention to procedures and precautions being taken now because Hainline said it's going take significant medical breakthroughs for the general environment around the virus to change.
“There's a whole new revolution of tests that have come out,” Hainline said, “and we're measuring how good those tests are . ... So, we expect the testing to change even more considerably over the next 30, 60 days.
“But … if a player tests positive right now, as we're here, that player is going to have to be quarantined for 14 days, and then you're going to have to look at all of the close contacts and you're going to have to make decisions.”
As Hainline sees it, the idea would be for football programs to have two distinct sets of personnel: An inner bubble, for the players and those that are in close contact with the players, and an outer bubble of people who are necessary to run a football event, but who are not in the same close contact with the players.
As testing improves — or current tests can become increasingly frequent — the picture changes. But even then, if teams can get to the point where they are playing games, the pregame testing regimen has to include everyone in the inner bubble.
Of course, this starts getting expensive at a time when athletics departments and schools, generally, are working with decreased revenue.
Speaking on the same Twittercast, West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons — who chairs the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee — said that before getting close to games, everyone in college athletics will need to have a change in mindset.
“We have the mentality that we're athletes, if I get sick I just fight through it,” Lyons said. “And (coaches and administrators) have got to be able to say to (athletes), ‘If you feel sick at all, this is not the time to (worry about) people thinking that you're weak.' Educate them to say ‘get your temperature, let us do the test' — do this as opposed to spreading this to other people if they end up having the virus.”