Coaches have duty not to hide virus news

Suppose there is a college football coach who cares mainly about winning. Suppose there is no possible edge he won’t at least attempt to exploit. And suppose the day before a big game, he sees the following news report about his opponent:

“Nine unspecified players will miss Saturday’s game, including three due to positive COVID-19 tests and six due to contact tracing.”

One might argue that possession of this information does not help the opposing coach one bit, no matter how ruthless he might be.

One might argue that unless the coach knew the identities of the players (he doesn’t) or which positions they play (he doesn’t) or even if they are starters or backups (again, he doesn’t), he’d be a fool to change even a single detail of his game plan based on this news.

So why, then, aren’t there more college football coaches like Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz? Why don’t more coaches see that not only is being transparent the right thing to do, it doesn’t hurt their chances of winning to do it?

And why, in a year like this one, is it still so surprising to hear a coach say that even if forced to make a choice between being truthful about the coronavirus and winning, the decision should be easy?

“This is a public health issue, not a competitive issue,” Drinkwitz told reporters in Missouri this week. “This is not an injury we’re trying to keep (secret). People should know what’s happening within our football program as it relates to the pandemic. That to me is more important than whatever competitive advantage it might be to win or lose a football game.”

It should be important to everybody. When the Southeastern Conference, of which Missouri is a member, and other leagues announced plans to press forward with football this fall, they did so while asking the public to trust them on a few things.

The SEC, Atlantic Coast Conference and Big 12 each cited medical experts who said players would be safe. Some coaches and college officials even mused that college-age people would be better off within the structure of a football program, where they would have an incentive and a routine to help avoid exposure to the coronavirus.

Now, setting aside any doubts about the sincerity of that argument — first and foremost, this was about getting unpaid labor back in the stadium to bring in millions of dollars for the athletic departments — those claims of player safety might not be preposterous on their face.

It’s at least within the realm of possibility that certain players might be better off going to practice and being tested two or three times per week than they would be somewhere else. But if that is the case, and if these grand experiments are being carried out at public institutions where most students are not allowed in classrooms, the public has a right to know the details.

In college towns that have seen cases spike in recent weeks, people have a right to know how many are coming from athletic programs. Neighbors have a right to know. Families have a right to know. And the fear that Saturday’s opponent might call an extra blitz is not a valid excuse to hold back testing information.

To be clear, much of the news about pandemic-era sports has been good. The NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball all have released regular updates on their testing results, and it’s gone about as well as anyone could have hoped.

But authority over college football isn’t as centralized, so it’s been up to individual schools to decide how transparent they want to be.

Some have been better than others. Some, like Oklahoma, started out as an open book, then when the season began elected to close it again.

Sooners coach Lincoln Riley, defending the move to stop announcing positive tests, told reporters “you don’t want to give your team a competitive disadvantage.”

But again, that reasoning is flawed. It’s a lack of bodies that hurts a team, not an opponent’s advance knowledge of it. And the sport clearly is struggling with keeping the coronavirus in check, as evidenced by the 21 games that already have been canceled or postponed this season.

There’s also this: If the theory was that college football would be better at keeping players away from the coronavirus than normal life would, multiple coaches seem to be refuting this.

Earlier this month, LSU’S Ed Orgeron said, “Most of our players have caught it.” And this week, when Texas’ Tom Herman was asked how the Longhorns have kept their players on the field, he suggested it might just have been a matter of timing.

“I don’t know that we’re doing anything magical,” Herman said. “I think part of it is we got our rash of (positive cases) out of the way pretty early. I think that has certainly helped.”

One wonders how many other programs have timed their rashes in the same way. One wonders if some teams didn’t prioritize safety like their school presidents and conference commissioners said they did. And one wonders, if Drinkwitz and a few other coaches can be honest about this, why can’t everybody else?

Transparency doesn’t hurt. Competitively, or otherwise.