Should Maryland send its athletes home as cases of Covid-19 begin to spike on other campuses?
Two years removed from Jordan McNair's death, Terps should be more cautious in keeping its student-athletes safe as colleges across the country are opening up
Every day it seems we’re hearing the same news from college campuses where student-athletes, mostly football players, have been brought back for summer workouts. Schools are quarantining them after they tested positive for COVID-19 or had contact with someone who did.
According to several news outlets, Clemson has had 28 positive cases, including 21 football players and two members of Dabo Swinney's staff. LSU reportedly has 30 football players in quarantine. The football teams at Alabama and Texas are also among other schools to be in double-digits for positive tests.
As the preparation for the 2020 season continues, so do the questions surrounding whether it will or should be played.
Here is another question for the University of Maryland to ponder as more of its athletes are expected to join the football team on campus early next month. Should the Terps take a more cautious approach than the rest of their Big Ten opponents as well as most Power 5 conference teams by sending everybody home?
The answer is not simple, but given what the university endured long before words such as “coronavirus” and “pandemic” became part of our daily vocabulary, I think Maryland should seriously consider that seemingly drastic measure than risk any of its athletes getting sick.
(On Friday night, a little over 24 hours after I first published this post, Maryland announced that during its initial on-campus screening of 105 student-athletes, none had tested positive. In a statement, a university spokesman said that ‘throughout this phased approach, we expect there will be some positive test results and have planned accordingly through the implementation of state and public health and university guidelines, contact tracing and self-isolation.”
If there’s a school that can’t afford to make a mistake in judgement when it comes to opening the campus, it’s Maryland.
A little over a week ago, the university marked the second anniversary of the death of football player Jordan McNair, who passed away after suffering from heat stroke. Just last week, there were the now seemingly annual remembrances of the cocaine overdose that caused the death of basketball superstar Len Bias in June of 1986.
Of course this is different, but the tragedies of Bias and McNair still impact the university on many levels.
In this case, taking a precautionary step of such magnitude would show where Maryland’s priorities are and should be: the health and welfare of its student-athletes. In fact, being so proactive might wind up putting the Terps ahead of one curve as another - that of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths - begins to inflate.
Dr. Rod Walters, whose external review in the aftermath of McNair’s death included 20 recommendations to prevent another tragedy from happening at Maryland, told me in an interview Monday that he believes the athletic department as well as the university as a whole is better equipped now to provide the proper care for student-athletes than it was in the summer of 2018.
“I think they definitely have a plan, and what’s important is that they communicate the plan to the people so that everybody’s on board with it,” Walters said. “From the meetings that I’ve had and the follow ups that I’ve had...I believe there’s a good deal of attention to it. I don’t think they’re in a different situation than anyone else (regarding COVID-19), but their eyes are open to the sensitivity and the gravity or severity of these situations.”
It was only last August that school officials announced the hiring of Dr. Yvette Rooks as the director of the university’s newly-created sports medicine department in response to the review done by Walters and his South Carolina-based consulting firm.
In a statement last summer, Walters, a former longtime athletic trainer at South Carolina and other SEC schools, called the hiring of Rooks and her working under the supervision of the university’s health center “a major step forward.”
According to Maryland athletic director Damon Evans, it was done to “put our program, our student-athletes, in a better position as we continue to improve the health care we provide them.”
While the number of COVID-19 cases have gone down even as the state has slowly started to open up - Phase 2 began earlier this month, though some counties have been more cautious than others in the activities allowed - the risk of sending thousands of students to college campuses in the U.S. this fall is still a hot topic charged more by the political landscape than the recommendations of scientists.
In a recent Op-Ed page article for the New York Times, Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg wrote, “These plans are so unrealistically optimistic that they border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of COVID-19 among students, faculty and staff.”
Steinberg also pointed out that most “risky behavior” occurs in an age group from late teens to mid-20s.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said recently that playing football could be problematic this fall.
“Unless players are essentially in a bubble - insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day - it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall,” Fauci said in an interview with CNN. “If there is a second wave, which is certainly a possibility and which would be complicated by the predictable flu season, football may not happen this year.”
Dr. Wilbur Chen, an adult infectious disease physician and scientist who is also an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, has the same message now as the one he delivered to the nation’s college athletic directors through a webinar in late March, shortly after the lockdown began.
“I am both fearful and skeptical for athletic programs all throughout the U.S., all throughout the world - not just football but all contact sports,” Chen told me Thursday. “Football is a completely contact sport so I don’t know how you play that sport by observing wearing masks and physical distancing.
“The whole training and the whole sport itself is not conducive to what we’re trying to adhere to with this situation.”
Though there are no on-field activities at Maryland and other Power 5 football programs - the workouts in College Park have been limited to small groups with adequate spacing between stations - college athletes are not in the type of isolated existence that professional teams are talking about using for their players.
The outbreak at LSU reportedly involved some football players who left the bubble to attend a birthday party at a Baton Rouge club.
The outbreak at Clemson came after the football team took part in a Black Lives Matter protest attended by many not affiliated with the school.
I understand why it’s important from a financial standpoint to play a college football season this fall or at least complete one in the upcoming academic calendar year. The survival of most, if not all, non-revenue teams is at stake because of the millions of dollars generated through football television contracts and ticket sales.
Chen understands the dilemma athletic directors and other college administrators face when it comes to trying to play the 2020 football season.
“The fact is is that it’s a multi-billion dollar business and for those colleges if they don’t have those programs for even a year can mean significant trouble with financial solubility for their organization,” Chen said. “I completely recognize that as well. I’m not a business person, so I’m not making those arguments based on economics.
“But that’s a lot of what I think is trying to be done, even in professional sports. … The situation all across the board, even the Olympics held off (until 2021). I understand that livelihoods and businesses are at risk, but this virus doesn’t care. I’m not making political decisions and I’m not making decisions based on anything but the science.”
Chen adds that a lot of decisions involve more than just science.
“A lot of these decisions bleed over,” he said. “You don’t make policy without politics.”
Chen said he has empathy for college athletes who need to play in order to secure a better future. What are being labeled as voluntary workouts are in reality either a form of peer pressure or subtle messaging from the head coach: if you don’t come back, your position in the lineup is in jeopardy.
“Their decision-making is not based on their self-interest,” Chen said. “It is being made because they’re being forced into a situation which they don’t like, possibly, whether they like or it not. It’s also an ethical or moral dilemma to be coercing people who don’t have the capacity to make true consent on whether they want to engage in a certain activity.”
Chen said that when he spoke to athletic directors back in March, as a group they wanted to figure out ways to be able to play sports safely.
“I’m not saying that athletic directors or programs are at fault, either,” Chen said. “But that athletic department probably has a lot of political pressure coming down on them. Their organization is saying, ‘Look, you’re losing millions of dollars and you’re putting us at (economic) risk.’ All of that fault is being put on their shoulder. They are being put between a rock and a hard place too.
“I think we as a society have to change a lot of responsibility on multiple, different levels. How we are even supporting athletic programs and college sports, we’re allowing organizations and institutions to make these kind of decisions based on the fact that billions of dollars are driving the argument for decision-making rather than the welfare of the people who participate in these programs.”
The optics of bringing a college football team in the middle of June for a season that is not scheduled to begin for more than two months also doesn’t look good, as if coaches are blind or deaf to the world around them. Does it really matter which team is in the best physical shape to win a conference or national championship right now?
I wrote last month that it might be more beneficial for second-year football coach Mike Locksley and his team not to play a 2020 season at all from the standpoint of recruiting. Given the number of recruiting wins Maryland has had since the lockdown began - most recently in getting Alabama quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa as a transfer - playing games might actually slow the momentum.
With the Big Ten reportedly considering a 10-game schedule made up strictly of conference opponents, it seems a possibility that the start of the season will be delayed a couple of weeks if the slate is trimmed. What’s the need to have athletes back on campus now, when the stories out the football hotbeds in the Southeast and Southwest suggest that a spike of COVID-19 cases is almost a certainty?
While schools such as LSU, Clemson and Oklahoma have designs on conference and national championships, exactly what is Maryland gearing up for in 2020? Already saddled with what has been ranked as the toughest schedule in the country among Football Bowl Subdivisions teams, the Terps have been picked to finish at or near the bottom of the Big Ten East.
Longtime Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione, who happens to be a Maryland graduate, has pushed back the arrival of student-athletes in Norman to July 1, and that could be delayed by the recent spike in cases throughout the state. According to a plan approved by the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee, non-volunteer workouts could begin as soon as July 13.
Teams would then be allowed to begin walk-through practices July 24, with regular preseason practice to open Aug. 7.
“(The plan) makes sense,” Castiglione told local reporters. “It gives us time to ramp up a little bit.”
Should the Terps be on the same schedule?
It seems unlikely that Maryland will send its athletes home, especially after none of them tested positive. Yet all it will take is for one positive test - symptomatic or not - for concerns to be raised given what has transpired in College Park the past two years.
With Darryll Pines, the dean of the esteemed engineering school in College Park, taking over July 1 as the university’s new president following the retirement of Dr. Wallace Loh, there will be those looking to see whether Pines is more decisive than his predecessor was when it comes to the health and welfare of Maryland students, not just student-athletes.
Along with not heeding the recommendation of former athletic director Kevin Anderson to move the care of student-athletes outside the athletic department when it was made more than a year before McNair’s death, Loh also failed to warn students or their parents of a potential adenovirus spreading on the campus a few months after he died.
One student, Olivia Paregol, died and others were sickened.
As the father of one of the school’s former soccer stars - Donovan Pines helped the Terps to a national championship two seasons ago - the elder Pines certainly can relate to what parents of current athletes must be going through right now as they hear of athletes at other school testing positive for COVID-19.
Part of the new Maryland football complex that is currently under construction, one that Locksley and Evans believes will be state-of-the-art when it is scheduled for completion sometime next year, is the Center for Sports Medicine, Health and Human Performance.
Officials in College Park need not wait for that to happen.
They should get ahead of this curve and seriously contemplate sending athletes home.
As Maryland coaches often tell their players, control the controllables.
What a horrible article. Remind me not to invite you to Maryland Day! If you have such a dark vision of our school please go to another state. It really sucks that you tried to dig up every dead and buried scandal possible to support your belief that Maryland students shouldn’t be allowed on campus. Was it every school should send students home? Or just Maryland because...Why don’t you hurl your mud/shi...at Clemson, Alabama, or Oklahoma State. Go Terps!