Experts find merits in conference-only football
Scheduling flexibility, the mitigation of risk that comes with travel and the ability to share testing protocols were the primary factors behind the Big Ten’s plan to schedule conference-only football games during the coming season, a move that might foreshadow similar decisions from other Power Five leagues and the rest of the Bowl Subdivision.
One other Power Five conference, the Pac-12, followed suit Friday with an identical plan.
The matching plans exist under a significant caveat: that games are able to be played at all, an uncertainty given the continued struggle to rein in the coronavirus pandemic. That dynamic looms over the FBS as teams prepare for the start of sanctioned practices, which can begin six weeks before the first game of a team’s season, according to a plan approved last month by the Division I council.
Yet the decisions made by the Big Ten and Pac-12 have merit, medical experts told USA TODAY Sports on Friday, providing a potential road map for the rest of the FBS even as the plan fails to completely address how to limit potential outbreaks of COVID-19 during the dayto-day interactions between teammates, coaches and support staffers.
“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” UNLV assistant professor of health Brian Labus said. “There aren’t many options, and this is one way to hopefully reduce the risk, yes, and still allow football to go on in the fall.”
For one, the elimination of non-conference games lessens risk by lowering the amount of interaction in an uncontrolled setting.
“Removing any non-essential interactions, in this case three games, does lower risk,” said Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at Northwestern and the executive director of the university’s Institute for Global Health.
“As far as staying within your geographic region, the biggest idea behind that is that there are definitely areas of the country, even within a state, where you may not be in a hot spot,” said Jason McKnight, a clinical assistant professor at the Texas A&M University College of Medicine.
The decision to play a conferenceonly schedule will likely delay the start of the season from late August or early September until later in the month, giving conferences and universities another few weeks to evaluate the best practices for handling testing and tracing.
This added time of experience will help conferences “figure out what works and what doesn’t work for them,” Labus said. “It’s almost like delaying the start of the season, which is a really good idea especially given the way the cases are trending right now in the country and a lot of the unknowns we’re facing as we try and move into college and professional sports.”
Creating a routine testing protocol that can identify players who have not yet manifested symptoms can greatly reduce the subsequent number of players potentially exposed, said Deverick Anderson, a Duke infectious disease doctor who co-runs Infection Control Education for Major Sports, or ICS. “Prompt and as early as possible detection is an important part of the multilayer strategy teams need to use to decrease the risk of transmission among players on a team,” he said.
However, the act of playing a conference-only schedule doesn’t address the spread of COVID-19 within locker rooms and football facilities, which since June has led to rashes of positive tests at several major programs.
And while remaining in conference can help streamline testing protocol, the geographic footprint of leagues in the FBS has been widened dramatically by expansion.
A similar measure adopted by the Southeastern Conference, for example, would eliminate Georgia’s rivalry game against Georgia Tech, teams separated by roughly 70 miles, but maintain the Bulldogs’ game against divisional rival Missouri, 730 miles to the west.