Separating athletes from “normal students” becomes central problem

College sports has to be honest with itself here.

This has been a discussion point for college sports and college administrators throughout the coronavirus pandemic: Can athletes be asked to go on campus and play football if “normal students” aren’t allowed on campus?

It’s a perfectly legitimate question for all sorts of reasons. The biggest tension point attached to the question, however, is that if a university allows the athletes on campus to get training, instruction, and other services connected to an on-campus experience, but it doesn’t allow the larger student population to receive the same, isn’t a university essentially saying that not all students are equal, and that athletes are a privileged population?

If universities — in their actions more than their words — elevate athletes above other students, aren’t they making a very specific statement that playing football matters more than providing on-campus instruction for the full student population?

Let’s be clear here: If universities ARE making these statements, it’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Many people would argue, quite reasonably, that in spite of any attempts to say that athletes are still students just like everyone else, they don’t live the same lives, don’t have the same pressures, and don’t carry the same burden of other students. They live in a very different world on so many levels.

What is complicated — and what college sports has refused to confront — is the reality that yes, college football and men’s basketball players are in many ways set apart from the rest of the student population. College football players and men’s basketball players are part of billion-dollar industries.

Are scholarships and weight training and expansive food offerings all tangible benefits athletes receive? Sure. That point shouldn’t go ignored or unremarked upon. Athletes are getting some benefits as a result of being revenue-sport athletes.

Yet, we are seeing in the pandemic that athletes are being viewed — by administrators, elected officials, and fans alike — as essential workers, people who are important to the workings of local and state economies. As much as they already receive, athletes still aren’t getting hazard pay or guaranteed health care. They don’t have a union or the codified right to collectively bargain for a larger share of the enormous revenue pie which exists in college sports.

Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott was very candid in a meeting with #WeAreUnited Pac-12 athletes, just before the Pac-12 decided to shut down fall football. He admitted that athletes shouldn’t get a large share of conference revenues, because it would essentially admit that athletes were professionals. It would create a pathway toward admitting that athletes were workers and entertainers.

College sports administrators don’t want to make that acknowledgment — not now, not yet.

However, look at the news at college campuses across the country, at Notre Dame and North Carolina, among others:

The biggest threat to college football might not be the attempt to play football itself, but to have football players interact with a student population which is allowed to be on campus.

This isn’t Gospel truth — not yet — but one can certainly make a perfectly solid argument in support of the claim that if football players are allowed on campus while the rest of the student population stays home, college football could safely be played. One can debate the point, and one can make plenty of reasonable statements about how advisable or desirable that situation is — especially since parents want their kids to learn in person under safe conditions if that goal is possible — but the point itself is reasonable.

It is hardly ludicrous.

Yet, any statement or claim which promotes or accepts the need for football players to be separate from the general student population does — by that fact — allow for the possibility that a rethinking of the relationship between football or men’s basketball players and the general student population is necessary.

University presidents and college sports administrators don’t WANT to confront that basic conflict. They have in fact expressed — out loud — that they don’t want to go down that road.

Yet, they might soon have to, especially if on-campus clusters or outbreaks become a main reason college football isn’t played in the ACC, Big 12, or SEC this fall.