Notre Dame players during a spring practice in March.
Photo: Santiago Flores/Associated PressNotre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick is one of the most powerful figures in college football. But as the coming season slowly falls apart, even the game’s most powerful figures feel powerless to stop it.
“With each day where the country doesn’t get a better handle on the pandemic, the risk to the fall season grows…and the only two options are no season or to explore the spring,” said Swarbrick. “We’re mid-July and the trends are the wrong way.”
Distress signs are everywhere in college football. In the Southeastern Conference—where big programs have vowed to play on—Alabama’s elephant mascot is wearing a mask, coaches are taping public service announcements, and the outlook is grim.
Meanwhile, moves by the Big Ten and Pacific-12 Conferences to cancel nonconference schedules have raised questions that are difficult to answer—like how Colorado can play Pac-12 rival Washington, which is over 1,300 miles away, but not Colorado State an hour’s drive north.
The situation at Notre Dame shows how little control even the game’s titans have as the pandemic unfolds. Notre Dame has only reported one positive case in over 250 tests administered to its football team, which is currently residing in a local hotel as voluntary workouts continue.
“I couldn’t feel better about our preparation, our thoughts about weekly testing and travel and what the spectator experience would be like,” Swarbrick said. “We really invested a lot in trying to make that as safe as can be.”
‘We’re mid-July and the trends are the wrong way,’ says Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
Photo: Robert Franklin/Associated PressYet as long as coronavirus infections rise, as they have since mid-June, the feasibility of staging gridiron contests this fall plummets. When the Big Ten and Pac-12 canceled nonconference games last week, Notre Dame immediately lost games against three big-name opponents: Stanford, the University of Southern California and Wisconsin.
“It’s the environment around us kind of collapsing,” Swarbrick said. Even if Notre Dame proceeds with its plan to bring students back on Aug. 10 and plays at Navy on Sept. 5, “Universities simply may shut down part way through the football season.”
At the moment, he’s not even sure about that. “It’s been a bad week. Every morning when I read the Johns Hopkins summary of where we are nationally or read about California closing back up things that it reopened…its saps everybody’s optimism and perspective,” he said.
As cases soar in the south, the SEC feels that its season is enough at risk that its football coaches suited up for selfies in school-themed masks for a public service announcement-type video begging people to wear masks.
“The direct outlook is not good,” said commissioner Greg Sankeyon social media before pleading fans to “consider our behavior to make possible what right now appears very difficult.”
In the meantime, college officials are trying to stave off a canceled season with conference-only slates. Other conferences may soon follow the Big Ten and Pac-12 in canceling nonconference games. SEC leaders are meeting in Birmingham, Ala., this week and will make an announcement about their season by the end of the month.
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Travel might be a factor in those decisions, some public-health officials said. Commercial air travel to get a team to play a far-off nonconference school would be riskier than travel controlled by the school, like a private plane or a bus.
Melissa Nolan, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of South Carolina, warned that variations in the virus also support the idea of staying closer to home.
“There are different genetic strains of the virus that are regional, and minimizing long distance travel would help to keep these genetic strains from intermixing,” said Nolan, a member of the Covid-19 task force for her university and its affiliated hospital system.
Both explanations raise only more questions thanks to the sprawling nature of modern college football conferences. A wave of realignment in the mid-2010s, driven by television contracts, changed the Big Ten, once firmly anchored in the Midwest, into a more sprawling landscape that spans two time zones and 1,300 miles.
Conference officials say that the main advantage in allowing games only between teams in the same conference is that they can force consistent testing and safety protocols that would be hard to agree on with teams from outside.
The leaders of the big-money conferences known as the Power Five have held a daily call to discuss the pandemic since early March. They’ve formed task forces of medical experts to draw up health guidelines, but aren’t much closer to releasing them than they were two months ago.
“One of the challenges is really variability across the nation,” said Dr. Chris Kratochvil, chair of the Big Ten’s Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases and associate vice chancellor at the University of Nebraska’s Medical Center.
Kratochvil said the Big Ten’s protocols might involve comparing the results of a PCR test administered Wednesday or Thursday, which take hours or days to process, with the results of a rapid test, which are currently less accurate, administered on Saturday morning before kickoff.
That’s a difficult, expensive prospect, and Kratochvil said there are broad concerns among Big Ten officials that schools with smaller athletic department budgets wouldn’t be able to comply, or that they could even feel pressure to fudge their adherence to the agreement.
Patriot League commissioner Jen Heppel—while offended at the suggestion that her league’s schools couldn’t be trusted—said it probably wouldn’t be possible to meet that standard. On Monday, her league canceled fall athletic competitions, becoming the second Division I conference to do so after the Ivy League last week. “The virus is not under control in our country,” she said.
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Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com and Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com
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