Yeah, college sports is most certainly making the pandemic worse

What are we doing here?

Here at For The Win, we generally use headlines in the form of a question only when the question we’re asking is either 1) actually difficult to answer or 2) so ludicrous that to pose it with any seriousness is part of the bit.

I’m not familiar with The New Yorker’s philosophy on headlines, but after reading Louisa Thomas’ stunning piece entitled, “Is College Football Making the Pandemic Worse?” I have to assume this fits into the second category. It’s a New Yorker story, so you’ll have to work to get there, but the answer is, unequivocally, yes.

The angle here goes beyond the fact that unpaid athletes who generally end up paying for a lot of their own medical care are being put at risk. That’s been covered quite a bit. What Thomas points out here is that college football marching on — despite 80-plus game cancellations, despite the fact that a great many of us did not even gather in person for Thanksgiving — has not just given us bits of normalcy but inured too many of us to the realities of living through a world-altering pandemic.

Thomas posits that normalcy is not just being able to watch top young athletes compete. It goes beyond that. We’ve learned a thousand things about ourselves through this pandemic, and so many others have come into focus, but this is for sure: Sports has never just been about observing the things on the field or court or ice. It’s about the rituals that give us cause to gather.

So when sports came back, even in their constrained form, it activated our natural desire to commune. To do the thing that we should not do when a deadly virus, which exists purely to jump from body to body, is still spreading unhindered.

Now college basketball has begun, igniting a different network of fans — some who’ve been tuned in to football and others who have not. And on a Thanksgiving when the best NFL game was postponed by COVID-19, there was something sort of nice about that. Who among us is not interested in knowing if Gonzaga will actually be good again, or if it’s just going to be another winter of hearing, Yes, They’ve Made The Jump only to watch them lose on the first weekend?

Yet it’s already become dizzying trying to follow the sport. While I typed this, Butler revealed that a person in the program tested positive after the team’s opener. So who knows when the Bulldogs will be able to get back to the court (it won’t be Sunday, when their next game was scheduled). Right before publishing, reports dropped that said two players on Gonzaga’s men’s basketball team will sit due to COVID-19 protocols.

Meanwhile, game previews no longer focus as much on interesting matchups or trends for either team; instead there’s intense discussion of when test were administered and at what time the visiting team is scheduled to depart.

Here’s Georgia coach Tom Crean admitting, after his team’s first game could not be played, that … it’s just going to be that way this year.

While he’s absolutely right, that’s a startling admission in so many ways. It’s been easier, for me, to watch pro sports: the athletes there have leverage to negotiate the standards for their return to play. College athletes, as has been the case for the entirety of the endeavor, have no such power. Sure, they’re allowed to opt-out. Just as they have a “choice” about attending “voluntary” workouts.

Now it’s been well-documented that those college kids want to play; that they’re chasing a dream. But, as Thomas points out, the rest of us want to do things, too: send our kids off to school, host or attend weddings, gather to remember those we’ve lost.

Jim Borchers, an Ohio State team physician who worked on the Big Ten’s return-to-play committee, told Thomas, “I don’t know that the student athletes should be punished for the inability of the general public to get their minds around how to prevent this.” Which is fair enough.

But college athletic departments have built these collective experiences as a way to generate pride and fun — and, mostly, money (from TV contracts and apparel and tickets). Universities use the experience of college sports to fundraise and attract new students. Running the foremost minor league in the country’s two most popular sports is mostly a marketing spend; it’s a nice coincidence that some “student-athletes” also get to chase their dreams.

Which is why, when balanced against issues like our stressed out and endangered nurses and doctors or the inability of so many school districts to safely re-open and educate children in person, it’s absurd to continue playing college sports. We’ve opted to fulfill TV contracts instead of stepping back and prioritizing more pressing societal needs.

At least we had Gonzaga-Kansas, though. At least there was that.

Gregg Marshall getting paid to go away reminds us college sports keeps getting worse