When It Comes To Playing Football in A Pandemic, Is There An Acceptable Risk?

Players and their families, coaches and school officials, must ultimately decide how much risk--if any--they are willing to accept to play in 2020

We need to have a conversation. There will be no right answer or wrong answer at the end of this conversation. But we need to have it before we go farther down the road that will (hopefully) take us to the start of the 2020 college football season.

Last Wednesday, the day before the SEC announced it would play a 10-game conference only schedule beginning on Sept. 26 , members of the conference’s student-athlete leadership council met with the league’s medical advisory board by video.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss ongoing safety protocols as the players prepare for the 2020 college football season.

The meeting was supposed to be confidential, but The Washington Post obtained a recording and wrote a story about it. The Post story quotes an unnamed SEC official saying: “There are going to be outbreaks. We’re going to have positive cases on every single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it.”

According to The Post, at one point an unidentified student-athlete asked: “For so much unknown in the air right now is it worth having a football season without certainty?”

It’s a totally legitimate question.

Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, obviously thought it was a legitimate question as well.

Here is his response, according to The Washington Post:

“Part of our work is to bring as much certainty in the midst of this really strange time so that you can play football in the most healthy way possible with the understanding there aren’t any guarantees in life,” he said.

Right here—with the SEC season set to start in 54 days and the ACC starting in 33 days—is where we need to have this discussion. Everybody involved—players, coaches, parents, support personnel and yes—the media—need to honestly ask ourselves this:

When it comes to the attempt to play college football during a pandemic, is there such a thing as an acceptable risk?

“We do everything in our power—we test, we bring in some of the best medical people we can find—in order to minimize the risk,” one conference commissioner told me. “But you can’t eliminate ALL risk. No one can make that promise and expect to keep it.”

Since the sports world was shut down on March 12, college athletics officials at every level have been meeting and planning and trying on a daily basis to determine an answer to that question.

The schools can do everything medically right in attempt to hold down the number of infections. But if someone told the players there is no risk they would be lying.

There are still the X-factors that come into play.

“We feel good about things when the guys are in our facility,” one athletics director told me. “It’s the 21 or 22 hours they are away from us. That’s the part we can’t control.”

We still don’t have students back on campus. That happens in mid-August and will certainly be another risk factor.

The SEC athletes aren’t the only one asking questions. Stories broke over the weekend that hundreds of Pac-12 athletes are prepared to boycott practice if a list of their demands are not met.

That list includes a host of issues that deal with safety and medical care, including a demand that they receive free health care for six years after they leave school. The list also includes calls that the players receive 50 percent of revenue generated by their respective football programs.

The larger point is this: The players have discovered their voice and are starting to push back, particularly in the areas of their health and commitment social justice.

All players have already been informed that if they opt out of the season because of concerns about the virus they will retain their scholarships. Some players will choose this route or, like cornerback Jacob Farley of Virginia Tech, will go ahead and start getting ready for the NFL Draft.

And if players choose this option they should be supported—not criticized. It’s their life and their health.

But in the short term, the fate of the 2020 college football reason rests with how the players and their families answer this crucial question: Is there an acceptable level of risk? What is the standard?

If the standard to play football in this pandemic is that there can be no positive tests, then it’s time to sack the bats and go home. Because the SEC official quoted in the Washington Post story was simply being truthful. Given the spread of the virus—particularly in the South—there are going to be positive tests.

Can those positive tests be managed to the point that a football season can be played? That’s the question that MLB, the NFL, the NBA and other sports franchises are trying to answer as they return to action. College football will ultimately have to answer the question as it moves into training camp later this month.

And this one other point. The players will be tested before every game and obviously won't take the field if they test positive. So the transmissions during the game, in theory, should be minimal. But we don't know.

But there are people who very sincerely question whether or not college football should even be trying to do this. They believe the risk of bad outcomes is too great.

That’s why we need to have this conversation because, at some point, a decision will have to be made.