Planning football is like scheduling the band on the Titanic, NCAA medical adviser says
While the four ACC schools in North Carolina continue to prepare to play a college football season in the midst of a worsening public health crisis without an end in sight, doctors advising the NCAA provided a stern warning on Thursday, and called for college sports to be put on hold.
“We have a quarter of the world’s total number of cases,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist from Emory University, said during a call with reporters. “Yesterday we broke a record, having over 1,500 deaths from coronavirus in our country. We have a serious problem.”
On the question of whether to play college football, del Rio compared it to another disaster.
“I mean, I feel like the Titanic,” he said. “We have hit the iceberg and we are trying to make decisions on what time should we have the band play?”
Del Rio, an associate dean of Emory’s medical school in Atlanta, is one of eight doctors on the NCAA’s COVID-19 Advisory Panel. He and another member, Dr. Colleen Kraft, addressed reporters on Thursday in a virtual conference alongside Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer. All three expressed doubt about the viability of a fall sports season.
“It’s a very narrow path to get fall sports right,” Hainline said, after expressing his frustration with a state of a pandemic that has only devolved since he convened the advisory panel in March. Back then, the emergence of the virus led to the sudden cancellation of college basketball’s postseason, and the eventual cancellation of all spring sports.
In April, leaders began discussing how college sports might resume. They thought, Hainline said, that by now conditions surrounding the virus would have been more conducive to returning to competition.
“We were envisioning that there would be a continued downward trajectory of COVID-19 infections and deaths; that there would be a national surveillance system, national testing and national contact tracing that would allow us to really navigate this pandemic and to resocializing both in sport and the rest of society,” Hainline said. “And that hasn’t happened, and it’s made it very challenging to make decisions as we approach fall sport.”
Whether there will be any college sports this fall remains an uncertainty. Various NCAA leadership groups, including the board of governors, took turns delaying a decision on the fall until Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, announced on Thursday afternoon that the NCAA was canceling its championships for fall sports.
Even so, a football season is still possible. At the FBS level, the sport’s highest, college football’s postseason exists outside of the NCAA’s jurisdiction. Individual conferences, and not the NCAA, control whether they’ll play.
Less than a month before a football season would have normally started, the so-called Power Five conferences — the wealthiest and most influential in college athletics — have become divided. The Big Ten and Pac-12 announced earlier this week that they will not play football, or any other fall sport, citing the concern over the virus.
The ACC, Big 12 and SEC, meanwhile, have announced they will continue their attempts to play on. In a story the Sports Business Journal published earlier this week, the chairman of the ACC’s COVID-19 Medical Advisory Group made the argument that a football season was possible, despite the virus’ relentless spread throughout parts of the southeast.
“We believe we can mitigate it down to a level that makes everyone safe,” Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist at Duke, told The Daily. “Can we safely have two teams meet on the field? I would say yes.”
He compared the risk of playing amid a pandemic to the risk of injury football players normally accept as a part of the game.
“Now the reality is we have to accept a little bit of COVID risk” to play football, Wolfe said.
Wolfe did not respond to interview requests on Tuesday and Wednesday. He is one of 15 members of the ACC’s COVID-19 advisory group. Each of the conference’s 15 members have one representative, and the majority of them are medical doctors. The News & Observer contacted 12 of the group’s members, and none agreed to be interviewed before Thursday.
Several who did respond referred questions to the league office, and one, Dr. John MacKnight of the University of Virginia, wrote in an email that he’d be willing to talk “once I have an OK from the ACC to do so.” (MacKnight later wrote that he’d be willing to talk on Friday.)
For now, it is unclear how many of the group’s other members agree with Wolfe’s assessment that a football season is feasible, or whether the group has taken a vote about whether to recommend the pursuit of a season. On July 29, the group released a report that characterized football as a “high risk” sport, along with volleyball, field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, basketball, wrestling and rowing.
Kraft and del Rio, two of the eight doctors who have been most responsible in leading the NCAA’s response to the pandemic, both questioned the wisdom of trying to play football while the virus has yet to be contained. Kraft, who like del Rio is an infectious disease specialist at Emory, bemoaned the nation’s fractured response to COVID-19, and cited the public’s failure to embrace, with uniformity, things like wearing face masks and adhering to social distancing.
“Essentially, our population has been preventing us from going back to collegiate (athletics) because we are not controlling this pandemic,” she said. “Because people don’t want to do the basic hygiene things that prevent transmission.”
The ACC’s football season is scheduled to begin on Sept. 10 “if public health guidance allows,” the league said in a statement when it released the schedule earlier this month. The conference had planned for each team to play 11 games, including one outside of the conference. Some teams are without non-conference games after other leagues have canceled their seasons.
In addition to the Big Ten and Pac-12, the Mid-American and Mountain West conferences, both of which are comprised of 12 schools, have also canceled their seasons. Old Dominion, a member of Conference USA, has announced that it will not play. So have three Independent schools: the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts and New Mexico State.
The conferences that are attempting to play on, Kraft said, are “sort of taking a dip your toe in and see what happens” approach. She predicted that “there will be transmission” of the virus, and that “it will be difficult” to continue playing, if the season starts at all.
“Physicians can look at this pandemic and try to mitigate risk, just like they’re trying to do in the conferences that are playing,” she said. “But I do predict because we’ve already been seeing it in those (schools) that have been very diligent, but there will be transmission and they will have to stop their games.”
In Georgia, which is home to one ACC school and one SEC school, del Rio said hospital beds and ICUs are near capacity — both more than 95% full. He acknowledged the success of the NBA’s bubble in Orlando, which has allowed for the resumption of the season in a closed environment, but he questioned how sports could continue without such restrictive measures.
“We need to focus on what’s important,” he said. “What’s important right now is that we need to control this virus. And, you know, not having fall sports this year and controlling this virus, to me, would be the number one priority.”
Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer, said college athletes across the NCAA’s three divisions have tested positive for the virus at a rate between 1% and 2%. He said he was aware “of about 12 cases” of athletes developing myocarditis after testing positive for COVID-19.
Myocarditis is a rare heart condition usually caused by a virus, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can weaken the heart and lead to breathing problems. In its report that evaluated the risks of the virus, the Pac-12’s medical advisory board, whose recommendations guided that conference’s decision to cancel fall sports, referenced the “emerging evidence” that COVID-19 “can potentially have adverse effects on the heart.”
Kraft, one of the doctors from Emory, said she has become “very concerned about myocarditis” as it relates to COVID-19 and how it might affect athletes who contract it.
“One of the things as a frontline physician is that I don’t see the statistics as numbers,” she said. “I see them as individual patients. I am currently this week taking care of people that have very sad stories, and that could have been prevented. And it’s not something that they did or didn’t do right or wrong. We are just — I think we’re playing with fire.”
She thought of her colleague’s reference to the Titanic and the iceberg, and the comparison of these conversations surrounding college football to those that might have asked about the band while the ship was sinking.
“I understand we’re all tired, and we’re all ready to move through this,” she said. “But if we don’t start ratcheting up our public health policies, this is going to be occurring for a long time. And the numbers are not going to stay numbers to anybody any longer — they’re going to be individuals that people know.”
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 3:35 PM with the headline "Planning football is like scheduling the band on the Titanic, NCAA medical adviser says."
