Notre Dame players and head coach Brian Kelly before a game in 2019.
Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty ImagesMary Sue Coleman loves college football so much that the former president at Iowa and Michigan plans to spend each autumn of her retirement in Ann Arbor, Mich. But as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the U.S., she sees a big problem for the roughly 70 schools still trying to play a 2020 season.
It’s increasingly unlikely that any university will be able to hold in-person classes, Coleman said. And that conflicts with the NCAA’s longtime view that being a college athlete means being fully integrated into the student body.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘Well, we can use the model of [some pro sports] and put them in a bubble,’” said Coleman, who is also a member of the NCAA’s board of governors. “You can’t put them in a bubble, because they’re students and they have to go to class. I mean, if they’re on campus and they’re not going to class, they’re not learning anything, then it isn’t any longer the academic environment. It flies in the face of what the NCAA means.”
The NCAA seemed unequivocal about this a few months ago. “All of the Division I commissioners and every president that I’ve talked to is in clear agreement: If you don’t have students on campus, you don’t have student-athletes on campus,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in May.
But college campuses’ rocky reopenings during the pandemic are testing that consensus. Some big schools seem determined to play football even if all other students are sent home.
Major-college football is part of the NCAA, but because of the way the 150-year-old sport evolved, the game is run by conference commissioners and presidents. Those leaders are now making their own decisions about the season.
North Carolina moved its semester online Monday after reporting four clusters of Covid-19 infections over the weekend. Notre Dame said Tuesday it will go virtual for two weeks after seeing a similar surge in cases. Both football teams paused practices—but haven’t canceled seasons.
NC State hasn’t seen outbreaks of the same magnitude, but on Thursday the school changed course and moved undergraduate instruction online starting next Monday. Students can remain on campus and the football team will continue full-contact practices, the school said.
A handful of universities have already said that fall classes will be primarily online, including several in the Big Ten and Pac-12 Conferences that suspended all athletic competition, including football, until the spring. Still, athletes there might not have to head home like the rest of their coed peers.
Football is the most lucrative sport for most major schools that have it. Without it, they face losing more than half of their athletic departments’ annual revenue.
Yet even as college football has grown to be a multibillion-dollar industry, NCAA leaders have emphasized that its players are students like any others. Article I of the NCAA’s constitution says a basic purpose of the association is to “maintain intercollegiate athletics as an integral part of the educational program and the athlete as an integral part of the student body and, by so doing, retain a clear line of demarcation between intercollegiate athletics and professional sports.”
The NCAA has long defended its rules against athlete compensation which are increasingly under fire by critics and politicians. It prohibits athletes-only dorms, for instance, requiring at least 50% of residents to be nonathletes.
An NCAA spokesman declined to make Emmert available to address the situation.
Some in athletics say football players are safest on campus, where they can be monitored with regular Covid-19 testing. But playing through the pandemic underscores that they don’t play by the same rules as other undergraduates.
“I think the optics of it are not good,” said F. King Alexander, president of Oregon State.
North Carolina reported 135 new cases on the Chapel Hill campus one week after classes began, pushing quarantine dorms toward 70% capacity. Its move to online instruction for undergraduates means that only international students, those with hardships and athletes can stay on campus.
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham didn’t directly address why athletes were given an exemption. “Many of our students have told us they want to play,” he said in a statement. “Their health, as well as the health and safety of our coaches and staff and community is our priority.”
The University of North Carolina halted in-person classes and reverted back to online courses after a rise in the number of Covid-19 cases.
Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty ImagesAs the campus empties out, the odds of players contracting the virus from community spread go down, but they are not zero. The Tar Heels football team knows this well: 33 players came down with Covid-19 during voluntary workouts in July, when they were among the only people on campus.
UNC students have been advised not to gather in groups of more than 25 outdoors or 10 inside to curb spread of the virus. Yet before its practice hiatus the football team, with its roster of 118 players and 14 coaches, continued gathering on the practice field and in the weight room.
A similar dynamic could play out at Notre Dame, where President Father John Jenkins on Tuesday moved all classes online and suspended in-person extracurricular activities until Sept. 2. The football team didn’t practice Wednesday out of an “abundance of caution” and on Thursday suspended workouts indefinitely after five players tested positive and six more would need to isolate. There were four reported coronavirus cases on the team between June 18 and this week’s outbreak.
Before the start of classes in South Bend, Ind., Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick predicted that how returning students affect viral trend lines will “determine more than anything what we do” regarding sports. He declined to comment this week.
A spokesperson for the Big 12, where football is still on, wrote in an email to the Journal, “absent completely shutting a campus down and making it inaccessible, continuing to have student-athletes on campus for the fall semester is foreseeable provided it is tethered to an academic component.”
U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala (D., Fla.), a former president of Miami (Fla.) and chancellor of Wisconsin, said the schools going forward with football are trying to maintain a revenue source that helps support the rest of their athletic departments, including Olympic sports. Still, she doubts the attempt to play will succeed during the pandemic.
“I never thought they were going to be able to pull it off,” she said.
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—Elisa Cho contributed to this article.
Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com and Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com
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