On a very busy Wednesday in the college sports world, the latest news to hit the wires is that 37 University of North Carolina football players and staffers tested positive for COVID-19.
The school said it administered 429 tests to players, coaches and staff within its athletic department (not just football). The school reported a 12-percent rate for positive tests.
The revelation of the 37 positive tests within the football program forced North Carolina to suspend voluntary preseason football workouts. The school did not disclose the level of severity in any of the 37 positive cases, nor did it release a numerical breakdown of how many players and how many staffers tested positive. This story would read differently if 35 players and two staffers tested positive, compared to 25 players and 12 staffers tested positive, for instance. That information has not been made available at press time.
The main thing to be aware of in light of this report is the severity of any of these positive cases. The lightning-bolt moment — the moment all of us in college sports want to avoid — is an emergence of a severe COVID-19 case which sends a coach or a young athlete onto a ventilator, with lung capacity being damaged or some other aspect of long-term health being weakened. If we have even one such case of severe COVID-19, that’s it. College sports will flatly not occur after such a case — if one emerges — and the industry will have to wait for a vaccine, period. If a severe case exists, that’s a huge, game-changing story.
We haven’t had such a story yet in college sports, however. If none of these 37 cases present that degree of severity, it is not a seismic development.
The other point worth noting is that if 37 players and staffers were to test positive during the week before a regular season game, that team would very possibly have to not play.
Writers who closely study college sports, such as Pac-12 expert Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News, have laid out alternative plans for playing football in which open dates need to be made available for flexing games postponed by COVID-19. A 37-person positive outbreak would be the kind of scenario which leads to a postponement and a subsequent makeup date. This scenario comes at a time when the Big Ten is considering a 10-game, conference-only season and is trying to build in flexibility to account for COVID-19 disruptions.
Stay tuned for more analysis of these complicated, intertwined issues. This North Carolina story will add to public anxiety about playing college football, but it isn’t a game-changer unless any of the positive cases are severe. In the absence of added information, we can’t make any more specific claims about the meaning of this latest story.