Whether to proceed with college and professional sports in the pandemic should be a fairly straightforward question. The risks of our activities have to be judged against their necessity, and given that no single season of a spectator sport is strictly necessary, any game that poses a significant danger of infecting and killing more people should be canceled.
Alas, little can be judged so rationally in our time and place, much less a sport with a propensity to make so many grown Americans as emotional as football does. With all the controversy but none of the import of reopening schools, the parallel debate over whether to play the college game this fall has devolved from public health debate to partisan culture skirmish.
Citing the danger to student-athletes and their communities, two major college football conferences, the San Francisco-based Pac-12 and Midwest-based Big Ten, canceled fall football this week. Still holding out hope of going forward with the season, however, are the three major conferences more rooted in Southern hotbeds of football fanaticism and, not incidentally, coronavirus transmission.
President Trump, naturally, sensed an opportunity for partisan and regional polarization. With all the nuance of his “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” tweet a week earlier, he urged the nation to “Play College Football!” Then the president called in to a Fox Sports Radio show to press the point, arguing that the players are “very young, strong people physically” who therefore are “not going to have a problem” if they catch the virus.
In fact, ESPN reported that more than five college football players have been diagnosed with myocarditis, a rare and dangerous inflammation of the heart muscle associated with coronavirus infection. That complication, a potential cause of sudden cardiac death among young athletes, figured in the deliberations of the Pac-12, Big Ten and other conferences.
Moreover, the virus’ spread among young people, who are more likely to show little or no signs of illness, fuels its course through the broader population, including older people who are more at risk of serious disease and death. That’s difficult to justify for the sake of football, though one Hall of Famer gave it a shot: “When they stormed Normandy, they knew there were going to be casualties,” former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz said on Fox News, effectively equating the fate of a football season with the fate of the free world.
The pandemic has already killed about 65 times as many Americans as the D-Day landings and is known to have infected more than 5 million, including at least 800 cases among college football players.
College football comes with particular risks of accelerating the contagion. In contrast to the NBA, which created a strict isolation zone at Walt Disney World to resume a coronavirus-shortened season, “college sports cannot operate in a bubble,” said Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott. “Our athletic programs are a part of broader campuses in communities where in many cases the prevalence of COVID-19 is significant.” The sport requires considerably more close contact among players than baseball, which has nevertheless seen the virus postpone games and hobble teams in the major leagues.
The college football debate is a microcosm of the larger U.S. response to the virus. Instead of a deliberate consideration of whether and how we can proceed safely given the reality of a deadly pandemic, we have a pointless debate over accepting or denying that reality in the first place. Unlike the best athletic competitions, it’s not much of a contest.
— The San Francisco Chronicle
