The juxtaposition of Big 12, Southeastern and Atlantic Coast Conference leaders explaining why they were forging ahead with plans to play football this fall while speaking on one of the pandemic’s deadliest days in the United States since May was too much for Dr. Carlos del Rio, an executive associate dean at the Emory University School of Medicine.
“I mean, I feel like the Titanic,” del Rio said on Thursday, the day after those conferences said they would not abandon playing football and other sports in the fall, as the Big Ten and Pac-12 had done earlier in the week. “We have hit the iceberg and we’re trying to make decisions of what time should we have the band play.”
That plea for college administrators — and political leaders and citizens — to take the coronavirus more seriously should carry considerable weight, considering that del Rio serves as a coronavirus adviser to the N.C.A.A. And as he spoke, he was joined on an Infectious Diseases Society of America webinar by Brian Hainline, the N.C.A.A.’s chief medical officer, along with another Emory infectious disease specialist, Dr. Colleen Kraft.
But del Rio’s caustic analogy also underlined how ineffectual the N.C.A.A., which moved decisively to cancel its basketball tournaments and all spring sports in March, has been in directing its schools about whether to go forward with fall sports.
In fact, later Thursday, N.C.A.A. President Mark Emmert announced that Division I fall sports championships excluding football would be canceled — not explicitly for health and safety reasons but because after a spate of conferences said this week that they would not play in the fall, there were fewer than the benchmark 50 percent of teams to compete in sports like women’s volleyball, soccer, cross country and men’s water polo. (Football runs its own championship through the College Football Playoff.)
As a result, football players at the remaining schools that are trying to have a season may also find themselves increasingly isolated on their own campuses.
This leaves schools in the uncomfortable position of having to justify playing football, a contact sport with rich TV contracts, but not other sports.
“I don’t know whether the pressure is going to tip,” said Gene Taylor, the athletic director at Kansas State, which is a member of the Big 12. “Even though we want to play football it’s almost like we’re standing on an island.”
The slow drip of cancellations and postponements this month has come without much of a nudge from college’s governing body. Though the N.C.A.A. last week provided what Hainline called “mandates,” they are in practice loosely worded guidelines — like the stated requirement that teams cannot play if the test rates in their communities are deemed “unsafe” by local health officials. Hainline did not directly address a question about whether schools would face penalties if they did not comply.
Still, the doctors on the call struck a more alarming tone than Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby and SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey did the day before, when they laid out why they were proceeding with plans for a season when other Power 5 conferences, the Pac-12 and the Big Ten, determined it was not safe to do so. A prime consideration, they said, was they had time to make a decision after moving their condensed schedules back to Sept. 26.
The Coronavirus Outbreak
Sports and the Virus
Updated Aug. 13, 2020
Here’s what’s happening as the world of sports slowly comes back to life:
-
- Lacrosse recruiting showcases have played on during the pandemic, creating tough calls for families.
- The Big Ten and Pac-12 college conferences abandoned their plans to play football this fall. But the South’s premier college football conferences have not made a decision yet.
- Augusta National Golf Club announced that the Masters would be played without spectators.
“The biggest argument is nobody’s told us that it’s poorly advised to go forward and do what we are doing,” Bowlsby said of the case for playing. “If we get to a place where our doctors and scientists say you know what? You’ve got two wheels off the track and you’re headed for a train wreck, we will pivot that day.”
The A.C.C. issued a statement on Tuesday that indicated it would move forward with a season; leaders of the conference’s schools were scheduled to meet Thursday afternoon.
The SEC, Big 12 and A.C.C. are plowing forward in parts of the country — mostly states throughout the South — where communities’ hospitals are being pushed to capacity and per capita infection rates far exceed the five new cases per 100,000 residents that del Rio said communities should be striving to reach.
In the Big 12, for example, Lubbock County, Tex., home to Texas Tech, averaged 25 new cases per 100,000 over the last seven days, and McLennan County, Tex., home to Baylor, was averaging just over 23, according to a New York Times database. In the SEC, Clarke County, which includes the University of Georgia, has averaged just over 32 new cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, and the districts around the University of Mississippi and Louisiana State have reported just over 29 cases per 100,000 per day in the last week.
Also troublesome, the doctors said, is the uncertainty about myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that has been linked in cases to cardiac arrest, that has turned up in “about a dozen” college athletes who have tested positive for the virus, according to Hainline. (He said about 1 to 2 percent of college athletes working out with their teams have tested positive for the virus.)
Among those who have encountered myocarditis is Brady Feeney, a freshman lineman at Indiana, whose mother detailed his condition in a Facebook post. Also, Michael Ojo, a former basketball player at Florida State who had tested positive for the virus, died of a heart attack last week at age 27 during a practice for his professional team in Serbia.
“We’re playing with fire,” Kraft said of the uncertainty about how the virus affects the heart.
As a front-line doctor, Kraft added that the cases are personal to her.
“When you say 1 percent, 10 percent, people don’t see that as individual faces,” she said. “I don’t want to see stories of athletes who can no longer play and that had promising careers simply because somebody didn’t protect themselves or they didn’t protect themselves.”
At less lucrative levels, where there is not the additional carrot of billions in TV revenue or the ability to spend on extensive testing, many schools have already decided to not play fall sports.
Division II and Division III canceled their fall championships earlier this month, and 12 of the 13 Football Championship Subdivision conferences will not play this fall. At the top level, the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Mid-American and Mountain West Conferences had preceded the Big Ten and Pac-12 in shutting down, along with independents Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Mexico State.
Ultimately, those decisions left too few teams in the sports that operate in football’s wake.
And despite football’s place as a lynchpin of the college sports industry, a reminder of how precarious the season remains arrived Thursday when the College Football Playoff Committee held its first meeting. It was chaired by Gary Barta, the athletic director at Big Ten stalwart Iowa, a school that will not be playing football this season.
"football" - Google News
August 14, 2020 at 05:41AM
https://ift.tt/2PQGtm2
N.C.A.A. Doctors Say Football Is a Bad Idea. But They Aren’t Deciding. - The New York Times
"football" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ST7s35
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "N.C.A.A. Doctors Say Football Is a Bad Idea. But They Aren’t Deciding. - The New York Times"
Posting Komentar