In early August, the rumors started to build: college football would be cancelled. Or maybe not. Or only in some places. President Trump took up the issue, and, with his Midas touch, turned the discussion to shit. He tweeted about it. He spoke with the Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, who had said that he wanted to play. He called into a friendly sports-radio show and lied to its listeners about the virus’s effects. (“It just attacks old people.”) Meanwhile, Lou Holtz, a coaching legend thanks to his years at Notre Dame, in the eighties and nineties, went on Fox News and, not for the first time, compared playing the upcoming season to storming the beaches of Normandy. (This week, Holtz spoke at the Republican National Convention.) The Republican senator Ben Sasse, who was once the president of a small college, wrote an open letter to Big Ten presidents, urging them not to cancel the season. “Life is about tradeoffs,” he wrote.
Medical experts were becoming increasingly concerned about the effects of COVID-19 on the heart, effects that could be worsened by exercise, and there were varying reports on the access that players had to coronavirus testing—not to mention the turnaround times for the tests’ results. Schools were cancelling other sports, bracing for lost revenue. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that each athletic conference could make its own decisions—effectively admitting the obvious, that the N.C.A.A. has limited power over the major football schools and that, in any case, it lacks the fortitude to make decisions for them. Some players said that they wanted to decide for themselves whether to risk their health—and, by extension, the health of others. Other players pointed out the myriad ways that the student-athlete system is exploiting them, now more than ever. There were also those who said that they felt safer within their football programs than outside of them. And then the parents got involved.
College football is a small universe consisting of local pride and gigantic television contracts, of real idealism and flagrant hypocrisy, pageantry and violence, talent and mediocrity. Why should a pandemic make it any less shambolic?
And so we’re left with a partial and patchwork season, divided and subdivided like the rest of the country. Those divisions are partly political and partly connected with relative levels of risk aversion; all of it is connected with money. The economic consequences of a cancelled season are catastrophic, even for smaller schools, some of which are paid large sums of money to be beaten by bigger ones. On Saturday, Central Arkansas, of the Southland Conference, and Austin Peay, of the Ohio Valley Conference, will kick off the season. We now face the eerie prospect of empty stadiums on October Saturdays, and the even eerier prospect of stadiums with fans in them. “I feel like the Titanic,” Carlos del Rio, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine and an adviser to the N.C.A.A., said after some conferences reaffirmed their decision to play football and other sports in the fall. “We have hit the iceberg, and we’re trying to make decisions of what time should we have the band play.”
The Big Ten was the first of the big Power Five conferences to push its season back to spring. The Pac-12 quickly followed and, when announcing its decision, released the detailed conclusions of its medical advisers, who had highlighted emerging information about the threat of serious cardiac complications, even in mild cases of the coronavirus, as well as inadequate testing capacity and unchecked community spread as students returned to campus. The case levels and positivity rates in many conference locations “exceed levels which infectious disease and public health officials deem safe for group sports,” the advisers wrote. The Big Ten was not as forthcoming about its decision-making process, and there was more evident division in its ranks—some coaches and schools seemed ready to revolt. Nebraska’s coach, apparently with the support of the school’s administration, even talked about his team going its own route and scheduling games. (This week, eight Nebraska players filed a lawsuit against the Big Ten, claiming breach of contract and questioning whether a formal vote had been held before the season was postponed.) The Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields started a petition asking the conference to reverse its decision, and it received hundreds of thousands of signatures. Randy Wade, the father of Ohio State cornerback Shaun Wade, flew from Jacksonville to Rosemont, Illinois, and organized a rally at Big Ten headquarters, demanding answers. The other Power Five conferences—the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Southeastern Conference—reaffirmed their decision to play limited schedules. Many smaller programs have done the same. (On Friday, ESPN reported that the Big Ten is discussing starting the season in January or possibly as early as Thanksgiving.)
“You can’t tell me that running onto a football field is supposed to be a zero-risk environment,” Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-disease specialist at Duke who chairs the A.C.C.’s medical-advisory team, told Sports Business Daily. “Look at all of the regular sporting injuries that we accept as a certain level of risk as part and parcel of football. Now the reality is that we have to accept a little bit of COVID risk to be a part of that.” It’s true that football players are accustomed to risk. Physical danger is fundamental to the game—there is a reason that a blitz is called a blitz and that football coaches are forever confusing D Day against Hitler with game day against Wisconsin. Then again, a torn A.C.L. won’t create an infectious cluster, and a concussion won’t kill your grandmother.
Everyone knew that cases would jump once students came back to campus; those in favor of football pointed out that players were less likely to contract the virus on the field than in a frat house, which is almost certainly true. “I do believe you can sufficiently mitigate the risk of bringing COVID onto the football field or into the training room at a level that’s no different than living as a student on campus,” Cameron Wolfe, the A.C.C. adviser, has said. Football players slobber all over one another, but they are being regularly tested, and being on a team arguably gives them additional incentive to be careful—to wear masks and avoid parties. But N.C.A.A. rules mean that athletes are not allowed to be sequestered. Those with in-person classes have to attend, whether or not it means sitting next to the guy who spent the weekend barhopping, and live in proximity to students who are eager to resume some semblance of a social life. Students, after all, aren’t being brought back to campus because it is the safest place to be—they are being brought back, in part, because universities need their student fees. On Wednesday, North Carolina State announced that its upcoming game against Virginia Tech was being delayed two weeks after a coronavirus cluster was detected within the school’s athletic department. That same day, the school’s chancellor said that campus housing would soon be mostly closed because “the rapid spread and increasing rate of positive cases have made our current situation untenable.”
A.C.C. and S.E.C. schools may be able to afford to test players multiple times a week—but what about the people who gather in bars, in living rooms, at tailgates, or even in stadiums to watch? (Many schools are planning on allowing smaller crowds—often around twenty to twenty-five per cent of capacity.) It’s possible that playing football is only somewhat riskier than usual for the athletes. But watching football, which is not typically a dangerous activity, now carries its own risk factors anywhere that the virus is spreading. In one week, the University of Alabama reported more than five hundred positive tests. Within weeks of students returning to the University of North Carolina, most of them were sent home, after several COVID-19 clusters appeared. But the athletes stayed. Turning a college campus into a bubble for college football effectively underlined what had already become evident: the players were being treated as essential employees, except they weren’t being paid.
And they are essential, in many ways. The gigantic television contracts depend on them, and so do the enormous coaching salaries and the bloated athletic administrations. Stanford, a Pac-12 school, has already cut eleven other sports—and that was before the football season was suspended. After the Big Ten postponed the fall season, Iowa cut four sports. George Washington, Dartmouth, Boise State, Cincinnati, and several other schools have cut programs—with more surely to follow. And the effects will be felt far beyond athletic departments. Football is the economic engine of some small college towns. Its loss will mean the loss of jobs, not just Saturdays in front of the TV. And its absence will cause many to feel genuinely bereft. College football matters to many people in a way that most sports don’t. It binds communities. Which is, of course, part of the risk in playing: it brings people together.
A previous version of this piece misidentified Justin Fields’s position.
More on the Coronavirus
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- A pregnant pediatrician on what children need during the crisis.
- Trump is helping tycoons who have donated to his reëlection campaign exploit the pandemic to maximize profits.
- Meet the high-finance mogul in charge of our economic recovery.
- The coronavirus is likely to reshape architecture. What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now?
