They’re young. They’re strong. They’re fast.
Football players are some of the best athletes in the world. They could also face outsize risk as they return to play in the middle of this pandemic.
The dangers come because of the nature of the sport itself and the players it features. Football is incompatible with social distancing. It also relies on a large share of people, despite their relatively young ages, who could face a disproportionate risk of severe complications from the coronavirus. According to the NFL Players Association’s ongoing research, more than 70% of NFL players fall into a serious, at-risk category, such as being African-American or having a high body-mass index.
Football is the country’s most popular sport—the richest one at the professional level and the one that drives budgets in high school and college—and it also faces the most complexities for a return to action.
“It will be more difficult for football than a few other sports,” said Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
While the pandemic shut down other sports across the country in March, football has had the benefit of waiting and planning. Teams from the high school level through the NFL were still months away from even their preseasons. The sport’s leaders could wait while they watched the infection curve, and develop protocols to play without missing months of their seasons.
Now, those plans are coming into focus. The NFL and NFL Players Association, last week, released its first set of guidelines for players coming back to team facilities. The steps include overhauled workouts and meetings, daily screenings and prepackaged meals in lieu of buffets, according to memos reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
And those same protocols are already receiving pushback: Ravens coach John Harbaugh said last week in a radio interview that they’re “humanly impossible.”
At the college level, even though many football teams at the nation’s top conferences don’t kick off voluntary workouts until this week, earlier starts have resulted in about 30 athletes at a dozen schools—including at Alabama, Iowa State and Mississippi—testing positive for Covid-19. That led to quarantines and signaled how thorny it could be for teams so large to keep operating. It also could undercount the numbers, since some athletic departments aren’t disclosing test results due to privacy concerns.
But while NFL teams and the biggest college programs can afford rigorous testing and dramatic infrastructure projects, the same may not be true for the vast majority of people who play football—at the high-school level or younger.
And at every level, from the youth through the pros, little can be done to change the risks that are inherent to the sport and the people who play it.
“It’s impossible to maintain 6 feet of space when you’re playing football,” said Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer. “At the same time, there are many things you can do to mitigate risk off the field.”
Little can be done to change the risks that are inherent to football.
Photo: Gerald Herbert/Associated PressOne of the primary hazards: the demographics of the people who play football.
Although data show that older members of the population carry much higher risk of dying if they contract the virus, football players face additional complications despite their young age.
Dr. Thom Mayer, the chief doctor for the NFL Players Association, rattled off a number of potential factors: the high incidence of complications among African-Americans, people with high body-mass indices and others with sleep apnea. “You just described a huge chunk of the NFL players,” he added.
In an April study of 5,700 hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the New York City area, the top comorbidities were obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. Of those who were hospitalized, 41.7 percent were obese, defined as people with a body-mass index over 30. Many NFL players would fall into that category—offensive linemen, for example, routinely weigh upwards of 300 pounds.
More broadly, African-Americans make up 46% of the players in college football’s five top conferences and more than half of the players in the NFL. Data from cities across the country has shown that black people in the U.S. have been hit especially hard by the virus, dying at a rate that’s nearly twice their share of the population. Possible explanations have included pre-existing conditions and socioeconomic factors stemming from systemic inequality.
“We’re interested in things that disproportionately affect athletes,” said Dr. Peter Haaland, a doctor on the NFL Players Association’s coronavirus task force.
There are also the risks from the game and training. The sport involves people tackling one another. Locker rooms can be cramped. Pro and college training facilities traditionally feature communal dining areas and weight rooms.
Where possible, the NFL’s protocols call to upend almost all of that. Beyond wearing masks indoors, the guidelines call for spread-out lockers, only 15 people in the weight room at a time and no in-person meetings larger than 20. Still, NFL rosters are larger than every other major sport and even the most palatial facilities will struggle to separate every locker by 6 feet. Then there are the smaller facilities and visiting locker rooms, which were often cramped even before social distancing.
Sills, the NFL’s chief doctor, says there’s a significant number of unknowns when it comes to the virus but that the league’s goal is prevention, early detection and a very aggressive surveillance program. The protocols include contact tracing for anyone who tests positive and daily screenings.
Those exhaustive and expensive changes may be more difficult at lower levels of the sport, which aren’t billion-dollar behemoths like the NFL. And there is extra pressure on college and even high school football to go on as planned: Both rely on the sport’s revenues to buoy entire athletic departments.
The NCAA has published “considerations” outlining how athletic departments might return from coronavirus shutdowns but isn’t policing how they do it. So schools are left to do it themselves.
In a recent Congressional hearing with college presidents, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, asked Purdue University President Mitchell Daniels what would happen if one of the school’s teams had an outbreak. “What’s your protocol?” Murphy asked. “Do you shut that team down?”
Daniels replied: “I think you would shut it down.”
Elijah Wade, a UCLA student who left the football team after suffering an injury last season, was elected to the school’s student government earlier this spring to make sure athletes have a voice about and protection from coronavirus. Without the same backing of a union like NFL players have, Wade wants assurances such as athletes having representation on coronavirus-related task forces, having third-party oversight of athletes’ return to play and athletes having a way to report concerns without retribution.
“There currently is no way for student-athletes to ensure that they’re being protected,” said Wade, who noted that officials at some schools had mishandled player concussions in the past. “They don’t trust the trainers. They don’t trust the doctors. They don’t trust the athletic department.”
High-school football carries its own risks and stresses. The same things NFL teams will be required to do and that big college programs can afford to do—such as disinfecting artificial turf fields, remodeling locker rooms and relying on jumbo-sized equipment staffs to constantly sanitize everything in sight—may be financially unfeasible.
The risk of young people dying of Covid-19 is low, said Dr. Mick Koester, chairman of the sports medicine advisory committee for the National Federation of State High School Associations. But, Dr. Koester said, “I’m more concerned about them getting it and then spreading it to Grandma and Grandpa. We also certainly have concern for coaches and officials as well.”
Dr. Koester added that, just like in college, high-school football is a high revenue sport that drives the financials for state associations.
“Although we certainly don’t want to make our decisions based on those things,” he said, “that’s certainly staring us in the face.”
Share Your Thoughts
Do you expect a college or pro football season in 2020? Join the discussion.
—Laine Higgins contributed to this article.
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com
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