How many cases are too many?
For all of the questions that lack answers, the biggest — for sports in our portion of the world, at least — keeps inching closer to one.
Yes, it does look like college football will happen this fall.
That’s the good news.
The bad? All those other unsolved questions that stand between now and then. They all demand attention, even the wildest hypothetical scenarios. Because the overriding goal is unattainable — safety in a global pandemic. Who knows what will happen?
For a college football coach, a meticulously organized world has been replaced by uncomfortable uncertainty. So many questions without answers.
“I could go on for an hour on that,” Georgia coach Kirby Smart said recently. “But I mean, I can’t answer those, and I also understand why we can’t answer those. … Change is almost inevitable in the environment we’re in.”
How much change remains uncertain, along with so much else.
What is not, however, is the widespread commitment to playing. It is powerfully shared and has gained momentum, so much that stakeholders —
players, coaches, athletics directors, university leadership, conference and NCAA officials, medical experts advising them all — can be more confident in this college football season being able to exist despite anticipated challenges.
At least 19 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision have athlete with positive COVID-19 tests. Not all those athletes are football players. Many programs haven’t revealed results either way and will not, citing privacy laws.
“A day that we knew would come,” said Arkansas State University Chancellor Kelly Damphousse, whose school confirmed seven athletes from three sports tested positive, “not just at AState, for colleges and universities across America.”
The University of Houston on Friday suspended voluntary workouts after six symptomatic athletes tested positive for COVID-19 in addition to a growing number of cases in the city. That combination caused the kind of swift action at a Division I institution that, while troubling, has so far been rare.
Otherwise, what could have been an alarming early setback in the sports’ efforts — think about the hysteria that accompanied sports’ first COVID-19 cases in March — has been largely shrugged off like an expected visit.
“I think there was every assumption that we were going to find that there were going to be quite a few (players) that would test positive when they got back,” said Todd Berry, president of the American Football Coaches Association.
The lack of widespread alarm perhaps demonstrated how much the tenor has societally changed since March, but it also reflected levels of preparation by programs.
Safeguards were in place. Plans were implemented. Workout groups had been limited in size, allowing players who tested positive — as well as those they’d been in contact with — to be isolated from teammates.
“We’ve had time. That’s what the spring sports didn’t have,” Austin Peay athletics director Gerald Harrison said.
Still, the positive tests have been a subtle reminder that college students aren’t going to be any more immune to COVID-19 than anyone else, raising broader questions about efforts to conduct a season that clearly is going to be at the whims of a contagious, novel virus.
Why are we safer now than we were in March? “We’re not,” replied Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University.
“We will start developing the answers as we’re doing,” said Schaffner, who serves on an NCAA advisory panel. “This is not a circumstance where a lot of answers will be firmly in hand before we start. … We have to be flexible as we get more information and ready to change the plan. It’s much like war plans. They look great on paper, and the moment the war starts, you’ve got to modify them. And people have to be open to that.”
How many cases are too many?
It’s one thing, Harrison said, to have football players test positive for COVID-19 now, while, “It’s another thing to have people test positive in September and you’re getting ready for TennesseeFlorida.”
“That kind of stuff,” Harrison said, “will be different.”
How different? That’s just one of many hypothetical questions. Will fans be allowed at games? Will the season start late or end early? Will all state governments be on board for campuses to reopen for in-person classes? Will teams be able to play full schedules and bowls? Will some schools opt to not play football at all?
And yes, what happens once a team has players test positive for COVID-19 after the season begins?
“That one is probably not too farfetched,” Berry said. “There’s no question there’s going to be probably some interrupted seasons or some changes in opponents that all of a sudden you find out on Sunday before the game. … You could have certainly a team play eight games and a team play 12 games.”
Another question: Who’ll make that decision on the fly — when cases are present on a team — whether that team can’t play games?
Short answer: the conferences, probably.
“What is anticipated is that the various conferences will have to come to some sort of agreement, some sort of set of ground rules,” Schaffner said. “What does this mean? Are we going to cancel the game? Do we just pull those students and not play them? But we’ll play otherwise and test everybody more intensely? There are various strategies that could be implemented going forward — again, none of them being perfect.”
The topic grows more complex when acknowledging these decisions won’t be up to conferences or institutions alone. Local or state governments could outrank them, not just in terms of sports but also in campus activity in general.
“The SEC has been great in guiding us,” Vanderbilt athletics director Candice Storey Lee said, “and we also have to take into consideration locally what’s happening. What’s the landscape on campus? What’s the landscape in the city? What are the public health and medical experts telling us? It’s complicated because it’s all of the above.”
Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, expressed caution about campuses reopening in June 4 testimony to a U.S. Senate committee: “These will be difficult decisions complicated by the participation of large numbers of supporters from all over the country for most college and university events. An infectious exposure could be a flash point for a significant widespread outbreak.”
The main architects of college football’s return, people like SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, have recoiled at answering hypotheticals too soon.
Sankey didn’t respond to a series of questions submitted through a spokesperson. But in an appearance in late May on the SEC Network, Sankey remarked about the league’s annual preseason football media days — which will go virtual in 2020 — that he didn’t want “our coaches just in a 45-minute dialogue about ‘What if ?’ ” at the event.
“‘Unprecedented’ is like the clichéd word now,” Sankey said then, “but there’s just not a rule book for this other than to make judgment decisions based upon the best available information, and that will take time.”
Tests: On and off the field
Hope is driving college football’s plans to return this season. So is money, given that football revenue is vital to the bottom line for most institutions that play it. And that invites skepticism.
“I hope we do not, because big-conference football is a big-money thing, risk the lives of amateurs who are predominately minority by going back before we can, “said U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.).
Most athletes, given their age and fitness level, would be considered less at risk for COVID-19. But many of their coaches — and other staff members — might not, a concern not unique to college football.
The question of what happens when positive tests arise is something all sports leagues are wrestling with while trying to resume play, be it the NHL attempting a 24-team postseason tournament or Major League Soccer‘s tournament to try to roll back into its regular season.
“There is no specific protocol for how many positive tests would have us take a step back and think about what happens next,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber said. “It’s why we’re so focused on regular testing and ensuring that we do what we need to do to keep our players safe and then managing what would have should a player test positive.”
Other sports could present a guide for college football, but efforts can’t be equated, given the existence of centralized leadership in professional leagues and the ability to pay for regular COVID-19 testing.
“We’re testing the temperature and the symptoms every single day,” South Carolina football coach Will Muschamp said. “Unless any of those change, then we don’t plan on testing (for COVID-19) at this time.”
“This is not a time to tell kids to suck it up,” Shelly Mullenix, LSU senior associate athletics director for health, said via the team’s Twitter account. “We want to hear if you’ve got a sore throat. We want to hear if you’ve got an upset stomach. We want to hear about your headaches because the physicians have to be part of that decision as to whether or not you’re safe to return.”
Muschamp has told his players to be smart away from the football facility.
While staying out of trouble is not exactly a new message, the context of 2020 means activities such as washing hands and staying away from crowds — on what could be a crowded campus — could not only help win football games but also ensure they even take place.
“The teams that are going to win this fall are going to be the mature football teams,” Muschamp said, “the teams that make really good decisions when they’re not in the building. … ‘Be very smart and mindful of where you are and who is around you, and make sure you have some knowns around you as opposed to the unknown.’ ”
That’s a lofty goal. There are unknowns everywhere, for college football and any other sport that is trying to play games again.
“Those unknowns, I think, are dissipating every week,” Berry said. “I’m significantly upbeat now that we’ll have some football this fall.”