U-M cardiologist questions Big Ten season postponement, calls myocarditis study ‘flawed’

A University of Michigan cardiologist pokes holes in the reasons why the Big Ten postponed the season as other conferences play on.

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We don’t know what we don’t know, especially when it comes to the decisions of conferences to either play or not play football this fall.

The Big Ten and Pac-12 both punted football from fall to a hypothetical spring season, while the SEC, ACC and Big 12 are all focused on holding a modified fall season as planned. Which avenue is the correct one?

That’s something we won’t know until we reach the hindsight stage.

However, while the Pac-12’s medical advisory board shared the conference’s rationale behind its postponing of the season, the Big Ten has not been equally transparent. Thus, many involved have been in something of an uproar. Parents at Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio State and even Michigan have either written open letters to the Big Ten’s leadership or have openly questioned in the press whether or not the conference has made the right decision.

The closest we can come to transparency is the revelation that there are 10 Big Ten players diagnosed with myocarditis, an inflammatory heart condition which appears to have resulted from a previous COVID-19 bout. However, as former Michigan defensive end and father of current Wolverines DE Chris Hutchinson — an ER doctor at Beaumont Royal Oak — noted, the evidence is anecdotal, and not mutually exclusive to the novel coronavirus.

Reportedly, the Big Ten’s presidents and medical advisory board came to their conclusion partially based off a study posted in the Journal of the American Medical Association on COVID-19 and the resulting myocarditis effects. However, one University of Michigan cardiologist — who openly says he’s not a football guy — took to Twitter on Saturday morning to dispel much of the study, noting how faulty it appears to be.

While he says he’s ‘not sure if football should be played or not,’ he insists that the Big Ten should not have relied heavily on this ‘flawed’ study to make such a crucial decision.

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Additionally, one of the other culprits appears to be the limitations of testing at this juncture. However, according to a former Obama health administrator, Andy Slavitt, it seems that there’s been something of a breakthrough on that front, with a Yale saliva test being approved by the FDA.

If that’s the case, given its rapid, accurate results and low-cost measures, along with the open sourcing provided by the test creators, testing could be done much, much more effectively, at a wider scale and more efficiently than it has been done as of recent.

Again, the issue here has less to do with the decision to cancel or postpone the season as much as it’s the lack of transparency and the timing of the matter. The Big Ten had just released a new schedule and its teams had started practice in earnest. As Hutchinson has noted, nothing from a medical or scientific standpoint had changed between the two dates — the decision to press forward and to postpone.

But those involved have a right to know what went into the decisions, especially given that the football programs — at least at Michigan — were above and beyond when it came to disseminating information as it pertained to its protocols. Neither the Big Ten as a conference nor University of Michigan president Dr. Mark Schlissel — an immunologist — shared their reasoning for pulling the plug on the fall.

Ultimately, whether it be in a few weeks or months, we’ll know whether or not the conference made the correct decision. But without open communication, their choice will be under intense scrutiny, especially if the remaining conferences who intend to play find a way to do so with little-to-no problem.