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Of all the op-ed pieces I’ve read during the past month about the prospect of college athletics (and especially football) resuming in the fall, the one that slapped me like cold water in the face was one written by a Drexel sports business administrator and professor.
The column, posted on May 6 and written by Karen Weaver for the business publication Forbes, was entitled: “Without A Vaccine, There Is No Way College Athletes Can Play This Fall.”
Weaver was a national champion field hockey coach in both NCAA Divisions I and III. She coached at Minnesota and Ohio State. She has since received her doctorate from Penn in higher education management. She is now a clinical professor in the LeBow College of Business at Drexel.
Right, another suited egghead from academia, you say. Why should anyone listen to a former field hockey coach and current administrator from a school that doesn’t even play football about what’s necessary for college football to operate?
Because, unlike singular professional sports franchises, college sports are all intertwined under one roof. If you’re having football, you’re having field hockey and men’s soccer and cross country and all the other fall sports.
And unlike a lot of people directly involved and invested in the prospect of college football progressing on time, Weaver has no dog in the fight. She can speak freely and honestly without spooning out public-relations pablum. And yet, she spent 14 years in the house of two major Big Ten athletic departments and knows what’s necessary to safely implement all of what’s needed to accomplish this overwhelming task.
It’s easy to scream demands that college football needs to be played to satisfy fans’ appetites, nourish the economy and salve Americans’ wounded psyche with a dose of their favorite sport. It’s harder to face the realities of what’s necessary to actually do it amid a pandemic.
Weaver concentrates her argument on how much more complicated it is for a large university athletic department to manage all the potential contact points where the coronavirus can be acquired:
Consider this: from the time they arrive for preseason practice until the end of the season, college athletes are in the same physical space with someone, or something touched by many other human beings. Think about these areas of a practice facility alone:
• The equipment room – all equipment is stored and washed every day in one area for multiple teams-how will that area be sanitized? Tested?
• A training room – tables and carts, machines, whirlpools, scales, floors, doors—how many times a day will all surfaces be wiped down?
• Weight rooms – cleaning staff will need to follow behind every athlete to clean each weight bench, strength machine, platform, stretching station and treadmill.
• Team Bus Travel.
But the contact points don’t stop there. The practice fields are full of contact points; the equipment and game balls are touched by everyone at some point. How do you clean those?
For those athletes who don’t have access to athlete-only dining halls, they will travel back to campus to eat. Will every single food worker be temperature-tested every day?
From there, they travel to their residence halls or apartments. Again, more contact points. Who do their roommates interact with? Who cleans the apartment? Are the dishes cleaned at a temperature that kills the bacteria? Does anyone accidently share glasses or silverware? And what do they do between the time they arrive home and the next practice? Go out with friends? And the cycle continues.
Weaver then shifts to the exponential magnitude of the possible spread and ramifications. This is all the nitty-gritty that we don’t have to think about but college administrators responsible for the health of all their students, not just athletes, must:
Here’s the bottom line, and the part that concerns me the most. After accounting for all of those contact points in just one day, multiply it by the number of athletes, trainers, assistant coaches, managers on each team. Next, consider this scenario:
One person, somehow, comes into contact with a virus carrier, and brings the virus to the squad the next day. In 2-5 days, the normal incubation period, that one person has potentially infected many other people inside that team. Some show symptoms, some don’t. But multiple players become carriers.
Those carriers take the virus back to the campus population. The ones showing symptoms are tested, then isolated, and contact tracing begins. It is obvious that this original person who was initially infected may now force the entire team to go into quarantine for 14 days (and potentially other non-athletes).
At that point, the athletic department will need to adjust season start plans. Opposing teams will need to be contacted and decisions made about the future of in season contests. Will there be enough players to play? Is the coach quarantined? The athletic trainer?
Then, here come the public relations conundrums. What to say to the media? We didn’t think it could happen to us? We took every precaution by cleaning every facility every day?
The families of the athletes will be furious they allowed their son or daughter into this situation. “They would have been safer at home,” they mutter to themselves. “How could X University have been so shortsighted?”, they wonder aloud.
Sobering? Yeah, I’d say so.
Weaver isn’t merely some doom-and-gloom pessimist. She told me during a phone interview on Thursday that she wants to see college football as much as we all do, and I believe her. She spent part of her career at Penn State-Abington (where she was AD, 2006-12) and said she craves those fall Saturdays at Beaver Stadium just like the rest of us:
“I watch it like everybody does,” she told me during our conversation. “I’m a huge fan.”
That’s partly why, on May 9, she reacted to a release of guidelines for the resumption of sports from the American College Health Association with her own thoughts in another Forbes op-ed piece on all the prerequisites for sports to resume.
I called her merely to ask why she wrote what she did:
“I think it was just years and years of being in the trenches, as a coach, as an athletic director, as someone who could see where things might go off the rails that the average person wouldn’t see because I know the business. I know how 18-to-22-year-olds think and work. And how easy it is to get away from something that seems so simple – social distancing. That’s the exact opposite of what athletes and teams do.”
But so many millions of dollars are dependent on major college football going forward, at the very latest, in the spring and within the end of the fiscal year on June 30. On Thursday, we heard ACC commissioner John Swofford say his league is planning on college football’s resumption in the fall. His stance is not an outlier among Power Five chieftains. His SEC and Big 12 counterparts have already sounded even more optimistic.
We’re all hopeful. But are the people in charge in denial that this is a doable logistical task? Are they really willing to fade the heat of deaths? Or are they merely disguising their true trepidation until tuition payments have been received and they absolutely must come clean?
Weaver believes that last interpretation is closest to the truth:
“Colleges need students to return to campus. So many colleges are tuition-dependent now. We’ve lost so much state funding. Pennsylvania is a good example.
“So, the best thing is to continue to say: Everything’s gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be normal.
“College athletics make so many of these big-school college experiences, particularly football. So, to say no too early to that forecloses any possibility of students choosing their campus, to come for the campus experience.”
What of the moral contract universities ostensibly have with their students? If athletes are asked to come back to play football in order to retain network television revenue, and then some of them are stricken by the virus, how is insurance handled?
“If you accept the responsibilities to play, you get infected with COVID-19 in a practice facility, who’s going to cover your medical bill? I mean, in this day and age with people losing their jobs and their employer medical insurance disappearing as well, who’s going to insure you and say: ‘Yes, we’ll cover any COVID-19 infection that might happen to you’?”
Wouldn’t the university have to? Not as the system runs now, Weaver said:
“I don’t think so. The way athletic insurance is set up is, 80 percent of the bill goes first to the student-athlete’s insurance. Every athlete has to have their own insurance plan. So, 80 percent of the bill for knee surgery or whatever goes first to them. And then, university athletics pays the other 20 percent.
“Then, only when you get into NCAA competition does the insurance for catastrophic injuries come into effect. And that’s only after you’ve hit the 80/20 percent threshold.
“This is really complicated. That’s why I’ve been trying to get people to think about: If somebody gets sick, who’s going to cover it? At the very least, don’t [athletic departments] have the responsibility to sit down [with athletes and their parents] and say: ‘Whatever your medical insurance is, you’d better know exactly what it covers’?”
Presumably, the schools would have to take on that cost as well, maybe through their student-athlete assistance funds. But those could dry up quickly. Which gets to the overwhelming strain on liquid revenue that all of this will entail for athletic departments already strapped by lost gate. We’re talking added millions for testing, cleaning, monitoring, rescheduling of travel and on and on.
What, then, does Weaver think is going to happen with college football in the fall?
“I think we’re going to have a hodgepodge in terms of teams playing around the country. Partly because of the nature of the virus and the way it’s moving from the coasts into the middle of the country. And the middle of the country right now doesn’t think it applies to them.
“I’m paying close attention to Wisconsin because they just opened up. So, how their numbers go up will be a very interesting tell for the rest of the Big Ten.”
And what if some schools decide to try football without students on campus? “Well… [pause] I try not to think about that.”
We’ll allow Weaver a pass there. She’s thought and spoken about a lot that few other university suits are right now.
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