NCAA’s chief medical officer explains how college football could look this fall
Even amid rising optimism about the college football season proceeding as scheduled, the NCAA’s chief medical officer, in recent days, warned of the painstaking steps that will be needed to play the sport in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In veteran journalist Andy Katz’s roundtable discussion last week, NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline said schools likely would need to test athletes every one to five days, including the day before a game, for college football to be played.
Hainline said each test costs between $100 and $150, and the conferences and schools likely would need to pay for them.
Hainline envisions college football operating with two bubbles: “an inner bubble, for the players and those that are in close contact with the players, and an outer bubble of people who are necessary to run a football event, but who are not in the same close contact with the players.”
Here’s how it would work:
“If you’re going to have a football game, before that game starts, all of the people in the inner bubble are going to be tested,” Hainline said. “That doesn’t mean that those individuals won’t test positive on Monday, but it means that day, it’s the best you have. … That increases the cost of the infrastructure of running a football program, but at least right now, that’s the necessary stuff that we see.”
Hainline added that “if a player tests positive right now, as we’re here, that player is going to have to be quarantined for 14 days, and then you’re going to have to look at all of the close contacts and you’re going to have to make decisions. And if the decision is that all of the close contacts are quarantined for 14 days essentially, well, that’s going to be really, really difficult.”
But he said there could be a way to play games even if multiple players test positive during the week.
“If the testing is such that you can really monitor every one, three, five days, or you have a five-day quarantine and you can predict with more certainty what’s going to happen after five days, you can start then imagining that there are scenarios where you don’t have to shut down an entire team or groups of teams for two weeks at a time,” he said.
“There’s a whole new revolution of tests that have come out, and we’re measuring how good those tests are. Some of them are serology [antibody] tests that even can tell if you’re actively infected — not just if you have immunity — and some of them are even saliva-based tests where you don’t have to go into the nasopharynx to get the sample.
“There’s a turnaround in 15 minutes; that’s not really perfected. So, we expect the testing to change even more considerably over the next 30, 60 days.”
Schools would be under no obligation to announce players who test positive and won’t play that week. In fact, universities likely would not identify those players and fans wouldn’t learn those players are unavailable until their team takes the field.
Hainline also said he could envision coaches not standing as close to players “or wearing facemasks.”
And Hainline points out that “we’re cohabitating with this virus for a while. It’s unlikely that this is just going to magically disappear or mutate out in the near future.
“We talk about a vaccine and we’re all very hopeful about that, but a very close relative of this particular coronavirus led to SARS [and] we don’t have a vaccine for SARS. We don’t have a vaccine for AIDS/HIV. There’s a lot of very focused activity on this, but even in the best-case scenario, that’s pushing well into 2021. And then, there’s probably going to be a large percentage of the population that is going to develop this no matter what we do because this is such a highly contagious virus.
“So, at some point a large percentage of the population will have immunity, we hope. But that takes time to develop, and, so, really, we’re looking into 2021 and even next summer of 2021. … That’s the new normal until there’s either a treatment that neutralizes this virus or we have an effective vaccine or the virus is really no longer causing such havoc on our population because so many people are immune.”
On that Katz-anchored roundtable, ABC/ESPN lead analyst Kirk Herbstreit said he sensed the idea of pushing the college football season back to the spring appears to have lost steam, and West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons agreed, noting “there’s a lot more logistical problems with that [spring] than trying to complete it in the fall.”
UM coach Manny Diaz, Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly and multiple university of presidents have said they expect a fall college football season.
UM athletic director Blake James told the Miami Herald that “at this point, I believe we will play all scheduled games for the 2020 season.”
Though UM president Julio Frenk told CNN that there probably won’t be fans in the stands for Hurricanes home games, Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick envisions at least some fans in his stadium.
“We won’t be at capacity; we’ll be at something less than that,” he said. “My view throughout has been if we think it’s safe for students to be on the field playing football, it should be safe for the students to be in the stands watching football. So we’ll build off that base of the other students. Faculty and staff will be a priority for us, to give them an opportunity, and then our fans.”
Here’s part 1 of our series on the future of college football this season.
This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 2:46 PM.
