PROVO — Baby steps.
That’s what we have this week on the possibility of America opening up the college football engine and staging a season.
There is more speculation than fact, more hope than an announcement, and so many more questions remain.
BYU announced Friday it would open its athletic training facilities in a phased-in manner for student athletes to return to campus and use facilities beginning June. 1.
Texas will open its campus for classes Aug. 26 but the semester will finish early by Thanksgiving, according to university president Greg Fenves.
Notre Dame announced Wednesday that its campus would open for classes in late-August and the NCAA announced student-athletes could return to campus training facilities for voluntary workouts beginning June 1. It will be limited to football and men and women’s basketball players.
That immediately met with objections from some, including former NBA star Charles Barkley, who worried the safety of athletes is on the line and a far more conservative approach is needed.
“We encourage each school to use its discretion to make the best decisions possible for football and basketball student-athletes within the appropriate resocialization framework,” according to Division I Council chairman M. Grace Calhoun, athletics director at Pennsylvania. Her statement continued, “Allowing for voluntary athletics activity acknowledges that reopening our campuses will be an individual decision but should be based on advice from medical experts.”
Most leagues are leaving individual teams to open up training when respective state medical guidelines dictate it is OK.
In the ACC, Louisville is the only school I know of so far that has planned a limited opening for training on campus May 27 with physicals and testing June 3 and voluntary workouts June 8. Only 30 football players will be allowed in a phased-in approach and there will be testing done. Any athlete testing positive will enter a quarantine period in isolation.
Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall said he would not open facilities until the state of Virginia allowed it. He questioned if a team like Louisville would gain a competitive advantage or if it would be a disadvantage, according to ESPN.com.
In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert has yet to clear schools to open training facilities or campuses.
The NCAA’s chief medical adviser described to ESPN a draconian style set of guidelines that may be needed for college football camps to open and practices to begin. He described a set of protocols, tests, quarantine, roster adjustments and rules deployed to protect student-athletes. It even included the use of two levels of access by trainers and coaches.
When I read it, it sounded like something you’d see in a zombie apocalypse TV series like the “Walking Dead.”
Others are turning to experts at Duke University for a 300-page document on how to safely open sports in the NFL and college.
The booklet, created by Deverick Anderson and Christopher Hostler at Duke, is an independent study they call “Infection Control Education for Major Sports.”
USA Today described the report, “At about 360 pages, the binder includes checklists, sample policies and an appendix of additional resource materials, including posters and specific documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anderson called the more global advice provided by ICS the “Swiss-cheese model,” in that no suggestion is perfect; all have holes. If you put them together, however, the hope is that the holes may not match up — much like stacked slices of Swiss cheese.”
A story by ESPN’s Mark Schlabach and Paula Lavigne claimed the financial impact of no college football could be a $4 billion train wreck for universities and “forever alter college-level sports.”
This is why many experts, like Patrick Rishe, director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis, believe the upcoming season will be be played because universities cannot afford to draw a big zero.
It will start on time, be delayed, be downsized with schedules, split schedules or postponed until late winter or spring.
If football is staged in 2020, it is likely games will not be played in packed stadiums and there could be no fans as NASCAR and the PGA Tour plan to do for the immediate future.
There are other speculations that stadiums could choose to allow 25% or 30% capacity crowds through a lottery draw amongst ticket holders.
But packed crowds may be a thing of the past in sports for at least a year or longer. Person-to-person transfer of the COVID-19 virus, according to the latest research, is the most dangerous challenge in dealing with the crisis.
Play and put it on TV. If there are no crowds, so be it. We are ready.
But are we ready to risk the health of our star athletes?