NCAA football faces ‘voyage of discovery’
Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Wednesday that he envisions college football players needing to be tested for COVID-19 “probably every two or three days” as a key component of bringing the sport back safely.
Bowlsby’s comments came during a webinar with other college athletics officials hosted by the LEAD1 association, which represents athletic directors in the Bowl Subdivision.
Bowlsby said his conversations with the White House coronavirus task force in recent weeks have led him to believe that such an aggressive testing plan would be viable by football season due to rapid improvements and innovations in test manufacturing.
But testing, Bowlsby said, is only one component of a large-scale recalibration of standards and best practices for athletic facilities that would include hospital-grade sanitation, rethinking locker room spaces and perhaps even football helmets that do a better job covering the face.
“There will be positive tests, and you need to do scenario planning to be ready to act on short notice and we need to begin the process of exploration about how we go about coexisting with this virus,” Bowlsby said.
“There are things that are arduous and will take time and will be absolutely essential to the ongoing mitigation of the risks.”
Bowlsby said the challenges of creating that kind of safe environment on a college campus would be even greater than what the NFL or the NBA would face in returning to play.
“Because our programs are embedded within collegiate operations and within higher education our task is infinitely more complicated than it is with 30 teams,” he said.
“As a matter of scale, simply as a matter of scale, our task is very different than that in professional sports. Even the pro leagues are finding trouble getting the answers they need, and what was a good answer a month ago isn’t satisfactory today. And what’s good today likely won’t be satisfactory a month from now. This is going to be continual voyage of discovery, and we’ll have to innovate going forward to meet the demands.”
The panel, which included Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick,
Western Michigan athletic director Kathy Beauregard, newly named UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond and Knight Commission chief executive Amy Perko, focused on how COVID-19 will change college sports.
One topic that received significant discussion was the decision by a number of Division I schools to cut sports in order to meet new budget challenges.
Central Michigan this week announced it was discontinuing its men’s track and field program, joining five other FBS schools that have made those cuts public.
Mid-american Conference schools have been particularly vulnerable, with Bowling Green eliminating baseball and Akron shuttering its men’s cross country, men’s golf and women’s tennis programs. “It really should be a last resort, and let’s look at ways we can cut costs by reducing inefficiencies,” Perko said. “I was talking with (former Idaho president) Chuck Staben, and he expressed concerns that his university presidential colleagues would overlook the net tuition revenues many of the so-called non-revenue sport participants produce for universities. When he was at Idaho he did an analysis that showed on the whole, the so called non-revenue sports created more net revenue for their university in terms of tuition than football and basketball did.”
Bowlsby said it would be shortsighted to view elimination of sports as a viable way for schools to save money and said it would negatively impact the U.S.
Olympic movement if there are largescale cuts to non-revenue sports. He noted as an example that only 16 schools sponsor men’s gymnastics.
“If those go away it would be devastating to our Olympic efforts in men’s gymnastics. I think our universities will be poorer, and our athletics programs will be poorer without that diversity of opportunity on our campuses. Broadbased programming is easy to talk about and expensive to do, but all of our programs will be poorer for not having those student-athletes around.”
Swarbrick warned that the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic will reverberate far beyond just athletics in higher education.
“We’re going to lose institutions,” he said.