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COLUMN: How The Politicization Of COVID-19 Will Affect College Sports

As states, and therefore universities in those states, begin to re-open, the politics of these decisions is bound to affect college sports.

Matthew Stevens

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- My fear for Josh Whitman is he’s about to be a lonely athletics director on the island of rational thought.

Among a lot of things and emotions that they’re usually not aware of in the moment, powerful human beings are sometimes naive to how they shape history. Whitman has never struck me as one of these naive people. In his world as athletics director at the University of Illinois, Whitman comes across as a deep thinker and somebody capable of understanding how we as humans are part of an political, environmental and economic ecosystem that is bigger than just what is important to ourselves. When he hired Lovie Smith as his head football coach, he did recognize how he was dragging U of I athletics past a longstanding barrier involving race. He understood that the day he fired basketball head coach John Groce on March 11, 2017 the tone of his media conference needed to be sorrow because in a larger sense, the program had failed over a long period of time. In his core I believe Whitman gets how the basketball program, football program and all athletics he’s in charge of at the University of Illinois are bigger than him but yet a significant part shaping a small part of the school, state, country and even the world with the student-athletes who graduate and try to make their dreams come true, like he did, in a very difficult world.

However, Whitman might be one of the few deep thinkers left among his AD colleagues as many of them rush to find ways to get football student-athletes back on a competitive field to meet the demands of the almighty millions of dollars they’re worth to the athletics departments.

Early on, my honest belief was that maybe the one and only benefit to the coronavirus was the idea of all humans getting retaught to appreciate how they’re a part of a giant ecosystem that is bigger than themselves. Maybe a spreading global health pandemic would reintroduce the idea of getting humans to think about how our decisions directly affect others instead of commonly taking that concept for granted. Maybe the attitude of we’re all in this together would overtake. Of course, it shouldn't take death to cause such massive rethinking but unfortunately, that’s just reality. It has almost always taken tragedy to reshape thinking.

Unfortunately, for the most part, my hope wasn’t founded. I certainly don’t want to diminish those in health care and other public and private institutions providing care for others. I applaud those who care. However, what I’ve found is instead of doing what was best for all involved, a majority of human beings have armed themselves with guns, flags and signs to protest their right to make irresponsible decisions for themselves and to hell with others. Suddenly, when politicians, who are elected to best represent our needs instead of our wants, are confronted with the answer of “I don’t know if that’s safe”, their response is “full steam ahead to do whatever you want” in order to maintain poll numbers for their next re-election campaign. The idea of freedom, state’s rights and curing overall boredom is now suddenly more important than nationwide public health. What an era to be alive in, huh?

In terms of what all this means in the sports world, University of Illinois officials, specifically school president Timothy Killeen and Whitman, are going to have to make a public choice to either support Governor J.B. Pritzker’s staged reopening plan or politically push the state's highest elected official to change course to salvage their own interests because everyone else around their border is on a potentially different reopening pace. Take the Big Ten Conference for an example. A league of 14 universities and thanks to conference expansion realignment for nothing more than the greed of the almighty dollar, spread out over 11 different states including recently Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Trying to get all of these states on the same reopening timetable is a pipe dream of epic proportions let alone trying to address how to get all the 41 states that are involved in college football’s Football Bowl Subdivision level on the same calendar.

"[Power Five commissioners] had a call this morning and I think what I had said, and I made it very clear even back to my press conference in June which seems like 10 years ago, is the fact that we will always be the Big Ten," Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said in a live interview on the conference’s television network. "And the Big Ten is the Big Ten for a certain reason. Which means we will always — to the best of our abilities — do what we feel is the right thing to do.”

What if what the University of Iowa and Purdue University officials have said they want to do (open campus in the fall and therefore, play sports as well) doesn’t jive with more cautious governors in New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan?

Can Whitman afford (literally in terms of money and credibility capital) to support a decision that could essentially end with the Big Ten Conference playing football in the fall of 2020 but without Illinois?

And even Warren essentially forces all 14 schools to be on the same page after a league-wide vote of the school presidents, here’s another important rub for all involved including Whitman and the rest of the Big Ten’s institution’s athletics department officials. Doing “the right thing”, as Warren suggested, has the potential to mutate (like COVID-19) into another competitive disadvantage. 

During a Zoom media conference on April 20, I asked Whitman specifically if he was concerned about reopening campuses and playing sports in the fall would become a red state, blue state political issue. Whitman balked at the idea saying “I don’t certainly think about it in terms of red state, blue state and I don’t think about in terms of Illinois being left behind”. Well, my polite suggestion to Whitman is he better start doing so now because we’ve reached the stage of COVID-19 becoming political warfare. Schools in the primarily southern Republican-based states of Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference are prepared to do what is necessary to properly feed their public’s addiction to football in the fall regardless of what medical doctors and public safety experts have to say on the matter.

"The hope is we all move along together," SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said this week. "There is room for different conferences to make different decisions.”

Let me translate that message into clearer English for all involved. “Short of another nationwide outbreak, we’re playing football and the rest of the country can either follow our lead and cash those television checks or feel free to watch us overtake those open TV slots on Saturdays.”

Let’s face it, fifty years from now the history books might point out that a healthy economy, citizens boredom mixed with overall restlessness along with state’s rights were rated higher than public health. And if that’s the case, Whitman and the University of Illinois may be forced to make unpopular decisions (which, for the record, I would undoubtedly support) in order to stand behind those who wish to be on the right side of history.

“Sometimes that may mean that we’re with a group. Sometimes that may mean that we do things from an independent standpoint,” Warren said on BTN. “But I will always say that my goal is to make sure that we feel comfortable that we do the right thing and that we remember that we have a responsibility with our brand, with our universities.”

I just hope everybody making these decisions understands a responsible decision might not, this time, be met with overwhelming or majority public approval. 

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Matthew Stevens
MATTHEW STEVENS

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