COVID-19 shaming won’t help football
We have reached the inevitable point of the pandemic where photographs of college kids returning to campus and acting like college kids are being treated on social media as if each sorority party or bar gathering is chipping away at the viability of the football season.
Football players at a variety of Southeastern Conference schools have tweeted pictures of their fellow students along with expressions like SMH (that’s Shaking My Head for us olds). Mississippi coach Lane Kiffin said Monday all the evidence you needed to understand how difficult it would be for players to avoid COVID-19 would be a drive through downtown Oxford. Nick Saban even made an appeal to the “moral integrity” of Alabama students to wear masks and maintain social distancing.
One question, though, about all these attempts to shame college kids into behaving responsibly so that a college football season has a better chance of happening: Have any of them actually met college kids?
Helloooooo. These are people who, for better or worse, cannot be shamed into anything. Just take a look at their Instagram feeds. Or their dorm rooms. Or their blood alcohol levels.
Nothing against college students, by the way. One day they’ll grow up and discover their responsibility gene. After all, they’re our future CEOs and politicians.
Well, let’s try that again. One day, they’ll grow up and discover their responsibility gene. After all, they’re our future teachers and community advocates and journalists, and one day they’ll look back on their college years with a mix of amazement and regret about how many Natty Lights they could drink and still get up the next morning for an 8 o’clock class.
The fundamental problem with asking college kids to act responsibly enough to avoid outbreaks on campus and thus help the football team carry on with a season is that, by and large, the students don’t care about sports nearly as much as we do.
That’s why it was both unsurprising
and somewhat amusing when Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne tweeted a picture of a large gathering of unmasked students on Sunday with the following comment: “Who wants college sports this fall?? Obviously not these people!! We’ve got to do better than this for each other and our campus community. Please wear you masks!”
True to form, the comments tilted toward the predictable: “They will be fine!” “They’re just living their life!” or, a classic in the genre, “But my liberty!”
If you were someone like Byrne or Saban, you’d be frustrated to see those pictures too. The amount of time and energy people who work closely with football programs have invested during the pandemic to reimagine facilities and processes to just have a faint shot at a season is indescribable. And to potentially see it all undone because thousands of students have so little self-discipline that they can’t even go a week without giving COVID-19 to each other in large numbers has to be absolutely maddening.
But it’s hard to imagine that the answer is shaming them or even threatening to take their football away.
After all, even at places where they take football pretty seriously, the games are completely intertwined with the social currency it provides.
That’s not to suggest students don’t have an interest in sports or whether the football team is winning. But what’s college football to college kids without the ability or the freedom to party?
It’s a battle college football, and colleges in general, are not going to win.
North Carolina gave up on in-person classes after a week, though the school said in a release it still plans to play football this fall. Notre Dame, a relatively sequestered campus environment, has gone from four positive tests on Aug. 10 to 13 last Friday to 80 on Monday.
These are undeniably bad developments for football, though it’s not unexpected. We all knew that once college started, college things would happen.
As nervous administrators watch social media feeds for pictures of irresponsible gatherings right on their campuses, they better figure out how to either live with that problem or get around it. Because if shaming college students for being college students is your only play, you might as well forfeit the game.