By Stan Caldwell
stanmansportsfan.com
The question is a simple one.
Is anyone going to play football in 2020? Will the Covid-19 pandemic wreck the football season the way it’s wrecked everything else?
The subject has hotly debated, feverishly discussed – and sometimes outright cussed – all over the country in every forum imaginable. Even now, in mid-August, the situation remains in various stages of limbo.
There are those who insist that it is perfectly safe to play this fall, that fears of the pandemic are overblown, and these folks bring out mounds of studies and statistics “proving” that it is safe.
Yes, it has been well documented that the Covid risks to children aged 0-19 are relatively low, and the effects for those in that age group who do catch the disease are comparatively mild.
My comeback is this. OK, that covers the kids. What about the coaches? What about the referees, the team doctors, trainers and other sideline personnel? The parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and sisters, the random fans, and, yes, the media; what about them?
It has also been shown that the risks of contracting and dying from Covid-19 rise in direct proportion with age, plus there are plenty of those in all age groups that are at a higher risk for one medical reason or another.
And even if the risk to the players (not just in football, but in all sports) is relatively low, if even one young person dies after catching the disease, I promise you that will bring football to a screeching halt. And one young person lost to this disease is one too many.
Heck, even a positive test of a single player could be enough to severely cripple the game, leading to new quarantines that could decimate rosters and leave some teams short-handed and having to forfeit games.
This is all a brave new world that nobody saw coming. Maybe we should have, but most of us live in the moment and don’t really think too far ahead, especially at a worldwide pandemic that has shuttered businesses, wrecked the economy and killed thousands of people.
The disease has confounded the best epidemiologists in the world, and I’m just a sportswriter with an interest in history, so I certainly don’t know what’s going to happen. I can take an educated guess here and there, but I have no way of really knowing what the future holds.
I’m also not much of a mathematician, and I don’t particularly understand higher statistics, except that I know they can be manipulated to prove anything you want. As Mark Twain famously wrote, “there are lies, damn lies and statistics.”
Players, coaches and fans want to see the game played. I want to see the games played. But if it’s not safe for everyone involved – including the fans, officials and everyone else I mentioned earlier – then the season should be postponed.
But as of right now, it appears that the National Football League is going to play, and it seems as though high schools in most states are preparing as if there will be a season this fall.
Last month, the Mississippi High School Activities Association moved the starting date for the 2020 season back to the first weekend in September, along with mandating some conditions for how teams will deal with Covid-19.
The MAIS – now the Mid-South Association of Independent Schools – plans to kick off its football season on schedule, with jamborees this week and regular games next week.
I have my doubts about whether it can be pulled off, but we’ll see.
The NFL is severely limiting the number of fans it will allow to attend its games (if it allows any at all), so they could theoretically play in a “bubble,” much as the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League have done in recent weeks, with some success.
However, basketball and hockey are sports that require just 10 and 12 players, respectively, in action, whereas football requires 22 players, plus seven officials, on the field at any given time.
And the NBA and NHL (as well as Major League Soccer) have brought every team participating into one or two central locations and played their games, basically, in a vacuum.
Major League Baseball, with its larger rosters and outdoor venues, has been a mess since starting its season in mid-July, and there is real doubt that baseball will be able to finish what it started.
As for college football, the forecast is doubtful. Just this week, the Big Ten and Pacific 12 conferences announced that they were cancelling or postponing their seasons, as have the Mid-American and Mountain West conferences.
Southerners in such leagues as the Southeastern, Conference USA and the Sun Belt are still bravely saying play on, and college players from all over the country have expressed their desire to play (although others have expressed their doubts and fears over the pandemic).
The conferences that have cancelled their seasons are citing insurance liability concerns in the event of a Covid-19 death among players and/or personnel as the reason for their actions, as well as a concern about heart issues that linger for those who survive a bout with the disease.
However, there are those – and not just conspiracy theorists – who argue that college presidents (the ones making these decisions) are using the pandemic as an excuse to somehow rein in and cripple college athletics.
Losing football revenue, and in many cases basketball money, would hurt, and possibly kill some college athletic departments, but the idea that schools will close their doors without football is simply false.
Colleges and universities receive plenty of endowment money from academic foundations, state and federal governments, private corporations, wealthy donors and tuition (including room and board). That money won’t stop coming if interscholastic athletics cease to exist.
As much as I love college and high school sports, I’ve sometimes wondered just how it was that the United States, alone among the nations of the world, grafted high-level developmental sports onto its educational system.
And it may well come to the point where interscholastic athletics does become a thing of the past.
Indeed, long before the pandemic arose – this time a year ago, in fact – I asked a few of the high school football coaches in the Pine Belt where they saw high school football in 15 years.
The answers were not optimistic, for a variety of reasons: rising costs of equipment amid shrinking budgets, higher awareness of the risk of serious injury (and, thus, higher liability for the schools), lack of interest or interest in other sports.
Personally, I am ambivalent about it. Interscholastic athletics is something so uniquely American and so intertwined with community that it would be hard to take sports out of the schools and put it into a club situation.
But the trend over the past 15-20 years has been to grow private club sports – travel ball, as it’s known colloquially – often at the expense of high school sports.
It has especially become prevalent in sports such as baseball, softball and soccer. Of course, junior hockey has always been a major aspect of the sport in Canada and in some northern states.
Everywhere else, in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, sports clubs handle player development, beginning at the youth level. European and South American pro soccer teams pay scouts a lot of money to identify talented players as young as 5, 6, 7 years old.
The clubs then take these kids – often from needy backgrounds – and groom them to become top players, often subsidizing the families and becoming responsible for the child’s education.
That may be where America is heading, and the pandemic may have just accelerated a process that has already been gaining momentum for several years now.
But this is all just scatter-shooting. For the moment, high school – community – athletics is still the dominant force in American youth sports. It remains to be seen if interscholastic sports are compatible with a global pandemic, but it looks like we’re at least going to try.
So, the bottom line for now is that high school sports, including football, will be played, somehow, some way, at least in Mississippi.
And if the area’s high schools do indeed play, I’ll be there. I’ll mask up like I’m supposed to, try to keep as much distance as I can from any potential carriers of the virus, carry hand sanitizer and do whatever it takes to be as careful as I can.
I’ve stayed pretty isolated these past few months, because I’m at a higher risk for Covid-19 than most. I’m 65 now, and I had major heart surgery in 2007.
I have been called a pessimist on the subject because I’ve urged extreme caution on the subject of sports during a pandemic. If accepting the reality of Covid-19 and wanting us as a society to do everything humanly possible to fight it off makes me a pessimist, then so be it
At some point, though, you just accept some risks to do the things you love. The MHSAA and the MAIS, along with the state departments of Education and Health, have weighed the risks and rewards and decided that, on balance, high school athletics can be safely played this fall.
I hope for my sake, and for the sake of the players, coaches, officials, fans and the associations themselves, that they’re right.
As a side note, accompanying this column will be the current football schedules for many teams in the Pine Belt. As the disclaimer at the top emphasizes, these schedules could be subject to change at any time. Don’t be surprised if they are.
This is all uncharted territory for everyone. The pandemic is real and it’s deadly, but the time is going to come where we have to try to get our lives back to something resembling normal.
Maybe high school football is good place to start.
Stan Caldwell is a retired sportswriter with more than 35 years of experience in the Hattiesburg area, and most recently served as sports information director at Pearl River Community College.
