Connecticut football coach Randy Edsall’s moment of clarity came when he was recently walking up the hill to his team’s practice field.
In the month since they had been back on campus, his players had assiduously adhered to safety protocols, which included daily screenings, and after more than 200 tests, none were positive for the coronavirus. They were also in a state that has kept a relative lid on the virus — Connecticut’s cases per capita is less than one tenth of that in hot spots like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Texas.
Yet what gnawed at Edsall was how disruptive the virus had still been.
Ten players were absent from that day’s workout because one player had come forward with symptoms, which might have been as mild as sniffles, and others who had been in contact with him were isolated until a virus test came back. Only eight offensive linemen could participate in the workout. It had been like that throughout July, with only a third of the players attending every workout.
As he walked, Edsall began to think about what lay ahead. By mid-August, UConn’s campus would be open and somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 students would be returning. He wondered what game days would look like: Would his team dress at their hotel and then bus to the stadium? Would players wear masks on the sideline until they went into the game? Could they retreat to a locker room at halftime?
And would the players be required to isolate themselves for 14 days, under Gov. Ned Lamont’s orders, after returning from games in places where the virus was not under control, like California, Tennessee and Virginia?
The next day, Edsall spoke with some of his players.
“They say to me: Coach, there’s no way that we can play a season,” Edsall said.
Edsall convened a meeting with his team’s leadership council, which represents every position group, along with Athletic Director David Benedict, the team doctor and the trainer before conveying their reluctance about playing to the board of trustees and President Thomas Katsouleas.
On Wednesday morning, Connecticut became the first Football Bowl Subdivision team to cancel its season because of the pandemic. On Saturday, the Mid-American Athletic Conference became the first F.B.S. league to announce it would not play in the fall.
To be sure, there were other reasons for Connecticut to pull the plug. The football program is swimming in red ink — it had a $13 million deficit last year — and it may well be less costly for the Huskies not to play this season. And as an independent, they had already lost six games from the schedule because opponents had moved to conference-only games.
But the decision, Katsouleas said, was largely driven by the players.
“I know our student-athletes love to compete and there’s a very strong sense of team,” the UConn president said in an interview. “When there’s a protocol that separates out a portion of the team, you’re really divided from your teammates. It causes you to rethink, why are you here?”
That question is being asked with increasing frequency by college players around the country at the moment, particularly in the Pac-12, Big Ten and Mountain West conferences, where players have organized to call for greater health protections, among other demands.
As such, they are the ones giving the most scrutiny to a return — as the N.C.A.A. stands by, unwilling so far to throw itself in the way of the Power 5 conferences as they push toward football. Playing games would allow the top football universities to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars in television rights fees for this season, even at schools where students are not returning to the classroom.
The Big Ten announced Saturday that its teams would not practice in pads until further notice, which at least gives teams the chance to practice social distancing, but it raises questions about how physically prepared they would be if their seasons open as scheduled on Labor Day weekend.
Shortly after UConn announced its decision on Wednesday, the N.C.A.A. Board of Governors punted a decision on fall sports championships back to each division, who were all given two more weeks, until Aug. 21, to make their calls. Divisions II and III needed only hours to cancel all fall sports championships.
The Coronavirus Outbreak
Sports and the Virus
Updated Aug. 7, 2020
Here’s what’s happening as the world of sports slowly comes back to life:
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- Baseball tightened its virus protocols again: Players and staff members must wear masks in more places and cannot visit “bars, lounges or malls” when they are home.
- With no live crowd noise as a buffer at baseball games, on-field sounds are easy to hear on broadcasts — and it’s not all rated PG.
- The University of Connecticut canceled its football season, and Divisions II and III scrapped all of their fall championships.
Along with the board’s announcement came a list of measures that might be best described as looking good only on paper: a hotline to report schools not following protocols, mandating testing at least once a week and within 72 hours of a game, and requiring that scholarships for athletes who opt out be honored.
The measures will certainly do little to comfort players at Colorado State, which is investigating a report that said Coach Steve Addazio pressured players to avoid testing. Or at Washington State, where players who were considering opting out for health reasons — but were questioned by Coach Nick Rolovich about their involvement in a player protest movement — were removed from the team. Or in the Pac-12, where 18 players who pushed for the same uniform testing protocols as the N.F.L. said Commissioner Larry Scott was dismissive of their concerns.
As of Sunday, at least 30 players had opted out of Power 5 programs, with some of them saying they would instead prepare for the N.F.L. draft. And the Big Sky became the seventh Football Championship Subdivision conference (out of 13) to say it would not play football this fall.
Gretchen Snoeyenbos Newman, an infectious disease fellow at the University of Washington, said, “The rapidity with which Division II and Division III came back with their answer is a guide to the N.C.A.A. that schools that don’t have large financial stakes in continuing to have their fall sports programs have decided it’s not in the athletes’ best interest to play.”
But even the Division III decision is an example of how the N.C.A.A., even in a moment of crisis, can be hindered by process.
The division’s management council (mostly administrators), which advises its governing board (mostly school presidents), voted nearly unanimously to cancel fall sports championships when they met on July 21. It took more than two weeks for the governing board to act on it.
In that time, Heather Benning, the commissioner of the Midwest Conference and the chairwoman of the Division III management council, said that when her board made its recommendation, 20 of the 43 conferences had already canceled some sports. By Wednesday, she said 42 of the 43 had done so.
“The health and safety piece doesn’t change,” she said when asked why Division II and III have canceled fall championships while Division I has not. “Because Division I hasn’t publicly announced a decision, I don’t think it means they’re looking at different standards. A lot of it comes down to resources. For Division III, a big factor for us has been access to testing.”
The lack of authoritative guidance from the N.C.A.A. echoes what has happened around the country: The federal government has largely left state and local governments to interpret health recommendations as they see fit.
The N.C.A.A. has given no standards for how to respond based on transmission rates, so a school like Northwestern shut down workouts after a lone positive test (which it later said was false) and Clemson has continued despite having at least 37 players test positive — including defensive end Xavier Thomas, who will redshirt while recovering from Covid-19 and strep throat.
“We haven’t defined and stuck by what we mean by low levels of transmission,” said Newman, the infectious disease doctor. “Because we don’t have an objective number — if we hit this number, we feel OK; if not, we don’t feel OK — we’re stuck in this qualitative world of low, medium and high. It’s very difficult to make decisions that way.”
At Connecticut, the number of cases was moot. It just became apparent that keeping them low was too onerous.
Still, Katsouleas, the university’s president, was loath to suggest that other schools follow his lead, saying he appreciated the autonomy to put in effect a rigorous protocol for reopening that will allow students and faculty to largely decide whether they will attend in-person or remotely.
Edsall, too, said the decision was merely right for UConn.
But he did explain why he was so adamant that it was the right decision, his voice catching with emotion when he said he would be making the same decision if he were at a Power 5 school: “These young men’s lives are more important than money.”
He recalled from his first tour as the school’s coach, when one of his players — Jasper Howard — was stabbed to death in a fight after a game in 2009. Edsall identified Howard’s body at the hospital and notified his family.
“Some of those things stick with you,” Edsall said.
He added: “Knowing these young kids — you’re their teachers, you’re their coaches, you’re their mentors. You become the parent away from home and the No. 1 thing is you have to make decisions that keep their health and safety and welfare at the highest level because of the commitment that you have to them and their parents.”
Too often, though, that pledge — which seems to be included in every school, conference and N.C.A.A. statement — comes with a caveat.
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Players to UConn Coach: ‘There’s No Way That We Can Play’ - The New York Times
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