USA TODAY International Edition
Duke, Notre Dame’s silence stunning
For 48 hours now, the silence has been deafening from the schools you would least expect to remain quiet about the health and safety of their student- athletes.
After the Big Ten and Pac- 12 made the difficult, heartbreaking and correct decision to shut down their fall sports in the midst of a global pandemic, you might have expected to hear right away from, say, Duke, which is ranked four spots below the Pac- 12’ s Stanford and one below the Big Ten’s Northwestern in the top 10 of the U. S. News & World Report rankings of the best national universities in 2020.
Duke would seem to be the type of school that would care about science and knowledge. And if that isn’t enough, there’s always peer pressure from your academic equals, or perhaps just trying to maintain the appearance of being the smartest people in the room.
But no. Duke, prestigious Duke of the ACC, is the one and only school in the U. S. News Top 10 to still be all in for blocking and tackling and having 22 young bodies breathing on and falling all over each other on every down for 3 1⁄ hours on Saturdays this fall as the
2 coronavirus ravages the nation.
Duke has now earned the dubious distinction of being the only national Top- 10 academic school to defy science and medicine and try to make a buck – many bucks – playing football. Everyone else is out: in order, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Penn and my alma mater Northwestern, as is Johns Hopkins, which is tied for 10th with Duke.
But let’s not pick on that renowned football power Duke alone. Moving down the U. S. News list, at No. 15, we see you, Notre Dame, tied with Vanderbilt. What in the world are you two schools doing, still playing along with the ACC and SEC in this intelligence- denying game of Russian roulette that will be attached to your names for years to come?
Then there’s Conference USA’s Rice, tied with the Ivy League’s Cornell at No. 17. Really, Rice? Football is that important to you? Who knew?
A quartet of ACC schools that should know better – Wake Forest at No. 27, Virginia at No. 28 and Georgia Tech and North Carolina tied at No. 29 – surprisingly haven’t spoken out yet. There’s a theory that an individual school in these hard- headed conferences might be afraid to publicly speak out in favor of the health and safety of their students. ( I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.) If there’s any truth in that, these ACC schools have no excuse, because there are six of them in the U. S. News top 30, counting Notre Dame for football purposes.
In the two days since the Big Ten and Pac- 12 exhibited the courage to do the right thing in the face of tremendous financial loss while the Big 12, ACC and SEC trudged on into the treacherous unknown, a lot has happened. On Thursday morning alone, Florida State wide receiver Warren Thompson said on social media that the school is neglecting to respond to COVID- related health issues, while another FSU wide receiver, D. J. Matthews, tweeted “All the lies smh,” after Wednesday night posting that he had tested positive for COVID- 19, then deleting the tweet.
Meanwhile, word from the NCAA’s COVID- 19 advisory panel is not good about forging ahead with sports this fall. Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University and a member of the NCAA advisory panel, said this about fall sports in a video conference Thursday:
“I feel like the Titanic. We have hit the iceberg, and we’re trying to make decisions of what time we should have the band play.”
Said del Rio: “What’s important right now is we need to control this virus. Not having fall sports this year, in controlling this virus, would be to me the No. 1 priority.”
Dr. Colleen Kraft, also an infectious disease specialist at Emory and a member of the NCAA advisory panel, said she was appreciative of the conferences that have decided to stop fall sports “because that keeps the safety of athletes as the No. 1 priority.”
As for those still moving ahead, she said, “There will be transmissions ( of COVID- 19) and they will have to stop their games.”
So what is it, Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice and the rest of you “academically oriented” schools? Are you going to show some brains and courage and make the right decision to pull the plug on fall sports? Or is the decision going to be made for you?