UM President: Football likely to be played in empty stadiums
University of Miami President Julio Frenk is optimistic a college football season will be played in the fall, however, he said it will likely occur in empty stadiums during a Wednesday interview.
“We certainly hope so,” Frenk said on CNN when asked if the Miami Hurricanes will play. “Everything we do will have safety of our students as the top priority. We don’t feel it’s safe, we won’t do it, but with the measures we’re taking, we will and we hope it will open.
“They will probably play in empty stadiums, like so many other sports, but we hope to have a season and we hope to have a winning season.”
Frenk also rolled out a plan on how to bring students back to the university in August that involved four pillars.
He called the first one the “Triple-T” of testing, tracing and tracking. The other three are extensive cleaning, protecting personal space through social distancing and use of face covers and masks and, finally, vaccinating — not necessarily having a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, but for the flu as that season approaches in the fall.
Flu vaccines are being made mandatory on Miami’s main campus, an extension of what UM has already done on its medical campus, said Frenk, who has vast experience in public health.
Becoming UM’s sixth president in August 2015, Frenk also holds academic appointments as professor of public health sciences at the medical school and health sector management and policy at the business school.
Before coming to UM, Frenk was the dean of Harvard’s school of public health for nearly seven years. He also served as Mexico’s Minister of Health from 2000 to 2006, where he reformed the nation’s health system and introduced a program of comprehensive universal coverage that expanded access to health care for more than 55 million previously uninsured Mexicans.
“I know there’s no school who has a university president who is an expert in public health like we do in President Frenk,” Miami coach Manny Diaz said in a web conference with reporters last week, “so I feel as confident in terms of our ability to bring, not just our student-athletes, but our student body back on campus this fall in a safe manner.”
The Hurricanes share Hard Rock Stadium as their home site with the Miami Dolphins of the NFL. Dolphins CEO Tom Garfinkel, earlier this month, revealed mock-ups of social distancing strategies to possibly allow fans at games, involving a reduced capacity from more than 65,000 to 15,000. The ideas were possible options and no decisions have been made yet.