Challenged to return with bubble setting ‘impossible’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s highestranking specialist in infectious diseases, made a statement on Thursday that tempered the expectations of football fans hoping for a fall season to proceed as usual.

“Unless players are essentially in a bubble — insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day — it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.

Such an environment is set for Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex near Orlando, where the NBA and MLS will resume their seasons.

Football teams have far more players on their rosters, but if such a bubble-type setting was necessary for the sport’s return, it does not seem feasible for the NCAA.

“If you look at what Dr. Fauci said [Thursday] morning,” Miami Hurricanes medical director and head team physician, Dr. Lee Kaplan, said on a web panel with Newswise, “he doesn’t think we’re going to be able to play football without a bubble. That’s impossible in college sports.

“There’s a high level of exposure of college students just meeting in the dorms and their living conditions and then we have limited facilities with 500-plus athletes at the University of Miami. Some schools like Florida, Wisconsin, they have 800 to 1,000 athletes.

“I was talking to an NBA player, and the whole idea that they’re going to go to Orlando, they’re much more restricted in terms of who they’re going to be around than somebody that’s in college and their comings and goings.”

University of Miami president Dr. Julio Frenk told CNBC in May that he is “pretty confident” students will be able to return to campus for the fall semester. He said two

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