‘There was a safe way to do it’
It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the tapestry of experiences teams went through, whether this undertaking was truly worthwhile. College football was extremely fortunate, in a sense. Even though younger people do not tend to be in the high-risk category for bad COVID-19 outcomes, there was an unspoken fear throughout the sport about a player or coach dying. Thankfully, that never came to pass.
But a lot of people did get sick – many not too badly, others seriously. There are documented cases of players recovering from COVID-19 and discovering myocarditis, or heart inflammation, which can put athletes at risk of a sudden cardiac event if not treated.
There were teams that ended up with 75 or more cases of COVID-19 cumulatively through the year. We won’t know for years if there are any long-term effects.
There’s also the cascading and impossible-to-measure impact of playing: the risky social gatherings in small college towns and big cities where fans watched games that made people feel a sense of normalcy while contributing to the out-of-control spread of a deadly virus.
How do you measure that against an alternate reality where there’s no football this fall, more jobs are lost and the mental health of players is an even greater worry than it was anyway? The truth is you can’t.
“We were never going to compromise anything about safety, health or welfare. Never,” said Oklahoma athletics director Joe Castiglione. “I can say without reservation that has been the strongest element of everything we’ve done. It’s been non-negotiable. Either it’s the right thing medically, it’s safe and in everybody’s best interests for their welfare or we weren’t doing it. …
“I think maybe one of the underappreciated accomplishments of this season is that we were able to prove there was a safe way to do it.”
But along the way there were many different versions of the experience, from the pomp and circumstance that surrounds a national title game to the despair of a 35-year- old head coach at a small program like Charlotte laying down in the stands when his season abruptly ended. They are all part of the story of 2020, a season that has finally made it to the finish — for better or worse.
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