By Arthur L. Caplan and Lee H. Igel
The athletics meetings of Big Ten and Pac-12 schools have announced that they will not play football this fall due to fitness and protection issues due to the coronavirus pandemic. But his fellow members of Power Five, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and Southeastern Conference, are still making plans to play. As many schools and universities prepare to return to school and the pandemic is over, it’s time to speak out against the immorality of allowing student-athletes to enter the field.
U.S. universities were hopeful that summer would bring adjustments that could give some academics the opportunity to live and be informed on campus in the fall. But there has not been enough social estrangement, masking and evidence available. COVID-19 cases are on the rise, and that’s without academics registering in campus dorms, without students cramming into bars, billiard rooms and other clubs in local communities. Most schools are completely remote online.
The stage has led leaders in peak establishments to realize that having the fewest students, universities and staff on campus is essential to keep others healthy and safe. This is the case of the spaces of the country that are still hot spots. They claim that this is the right thing to do to weigh decisions about the balance between expanding virus transmission rates and falling finance. But not all school officials, sports directors, coaches, student-athletes and alumni agree with the sport, especially football.
Former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz says that “when they broke into Normandy, they knew there would be casualties, there would be risks.” This analogy of football to war surely doesn’t make sense. Dying to defeat Hitler is not the same as a dying student-athlete so his team can win the SEC championship.
Nick Saban, Alabama’s less deaf head coach, believes that his team’s protective measures and testing procedures for student-athletes make football amenities a safer position than anywhere else on campus. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh insists that strict protocols within the football program, which have not resulted in positive testing during summer workouts, mean you can play the season. Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a Duke University infectious disease specialist who chairs the CCA Medical Advisory Group, says it is imaginable to “sufficiently mitigate the threat of bringing COVID to the football area or education room to a point other than living as a student on campus.”
It is imaginable that sports groups manage situations in their facilities to reduce the threat of exposure and the number of positive cases. Teams from the English Premier League, La Liga and Bundesliga in Europe have done so. So have one in the NBA, WNBA, NHL, MLS and NWSL staying in your bubbles. However, MLB was less certain to travel from a hot domain to a hot domain without a bubble.
University sports departments do not have the financial and logistical resources to create the types of bubbles needed for sound education and safe competition. Even if the bubbles between student and athletes’ dormitories and team amenities could be established, limited exposure to campus and local communities would still create serious risk. And if the school grounds and classrooms can be free of COVID-19, traveling between cities to play and perhaps visiting local “attractions” of interest increases the likelihood of exposure and transmission, especially in the virus hot spots.
There is also an educational and ethical challenge in allowing student-athletes to travel. The few schools that offer face-to-face courses prevent teams of academics from going into the countryside, visiting sites, and reading abroad. If fitness and protection challenges do not allow artistic elegance to be explored as much as a museum on campus, how can we justify letting the football team pass to an airport, hotel, bus and stadium in another location in the city, and the most dangerous? ?
One justification that does not pass in terms of precedence for student-athletes’ fitness would possibly be that gaming departments face old profit deficits without football. University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez said a season without the game can also leave his program alone with more than $100 million in success. This type of deficit would require monetary assistance from universities at a time when peak establishments face major budgetary unrest only for their educational activities.
There is also the ethical factor of creating situations in which students-athletes may feel compelled to replay earlier than fitness citizens recommend. Athletes are proud of their ethics of being difficult enough to combat illness and injury. They should stay in the game, or at least look at it, rather than threaten to waste their homework on someone else. Requiring academics to join this popular during a furious pandemic is, at best, a productive clash of interests and, at worst, negligence.
Medical science still doesn’t know enough about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on fitness for school football to be played safely this season. He knows, despite claims from President Donald Trump and administrative adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, that young and well-formed school athletes are probably not immune to symptoms such as cardiovascular disease, lung disorders and emotional distress. The unknowns are great, which justifies allowing fitness personnel with the right protective apparatus to review their lives if they are infected, but not to inspire young men to participate in trainings and games without masks in sight.
I’m sorry, Coach Holtz and Mr. President, times are neither a country at war nor normal. Coaches, AD, referees and directors deserve not to pretend otherwise. They have to turn off autumn football. The game can start next year. Students who may be in poor health or die playing now will have to be at the forefront of enthusiasts and those who care about school football.
The leaders of Big Ten and Pac-12 did the right thing by beating themselves between meetings that postponed their fall season. The CCA, the big 12 and the SEC will have to stick to their demands. Playing now puts the fitness of students-athletes and everyone on campus in grave.
Lee Igel strives to make other people better perceive the decisions that shape the gaming industry and its communities. He is an associate clinical professor at NYU Tisch
Lee Igel strives to make other people better perceive the decisions that shape the gaming industry and its communities. Mr. Ethics Division of the Langone Health Department of Population Health at NYU.