SMU running back Xavier Jones runs with the ball during the second quarter of an NCAA college ... [+]
By Donna Lopiano and Andrew Zimbalist
College coaches, faced with justifying why they were bringing fall sports athletes back to campus for voluntary on-campus workouts in June when the U.S. pandemic was not close to being under control, came up with some pretty compelling story lines. They argued and are still arguing that “the kids are safer here than at home,” or that “these are poor kids who need the scholarship money we can give them when they return to train even though our campus is closed and athletes are not attending summer school.”
Athletic directors added more story lines. There was the denial of doing it for the money: “Oh, this isn’t about football and money; we’re bringing back our fall sports like soccer and women’s volleyball, too.” Right.
And then there are the lines about football games lifting the student body spirit out of their pandemic depression or helping community businesses dependent on game days to recover economically. And there are the detailed stories boasting about all of the special arrangements made to keep athletes safe from Covid-19: “We are going to test them when they arrive and quarantine them before they start practice and then retest and sanitize the weight training facilities, take their temperatures every day, and retest once or twice a week and provide single rooms and retest two days before games.”
Athletic departments purposely created the public impression that “we’ve thought of it all; we can deal with this.” Why? Fear of millions of dollars in lost TV revenues if college football teams did not take the field? Fear that closing down athletics would endanger seven- and eight-figure head coach salaries and bonuses and the lucrative compensation of athletic directors? Fear that corporate sponsors would find other billboards to display their logos? Fear that alumni and fans would not continue their generous athletics and institutional giving without football fueling campus affinity? Answer: All of the above.
Well, the athletes returned, and what happened? Predictably, the story lines crumbled. Every day we read reports of the numbers of quarantined, tested, sanitized young and strong athletes who have tested positive for Covid-19. As of June 27, at least 150 college athletes had contracted the virus, despite the fact that 66 out of 130 FBS schools refuse to report the number of new cases. But the show must go on. Football practice must go on. Football games must happen this fall no matter the cost. However, new story lines were needed because the “we have it all figured out” and “athletes are safer here” stories turned out to be fake news.
Now we are truly in the world of “Believe It or Not.” Would you believe that coaches and athletic directors are scheming to use sick kids as a strategic ploy to win games by invoking health privacy rules to justify not reporting the identity of infected players to the media (something they could not do if their unavailability was the result of athletic injury)? One athletic director ruminated that the football team could play its second-string running quarterback instead of the sick-but-we-won’t-tell-anyone passing quarterback to thwart its opponents’ defensive game plans. The storytellers are even suggesting a new ethics lesson—that teams are not morally compelled to tell the other team who is sick, only to not put a sick player in the game. Are teams ethically bound to tell opposing schools and players that they are about to compete against a team on which a player or players tested positive several days earlier, to give them the opportunity to refuse to play? Or is playing a shell game to win, maybe hiding the asymptomatic great player, okay? Hey, it’s like the flea-flicker pass—just a little gamesmanship, right?
Some even wonder whether the 66 schools that refuse to report infection numbers have a different plan: get everyone on the team infected (herd immunity!) before the season starts so that they can play all their games at full strength. So what if an athlete or two dies in the process? So what if the team infects all other teams it plays against and anyone else in the community? So what if a few older or more vulnerable community folks die? Could such a thought, so stunning in its immorality, be on the mind of any high-salaried football coach?
The silence of college presidents and trustees in the face of such insane behavior is just as deafening as it was during public consumption of the first round of unsuccessful stories. Thus, we no longer think higher education simply has lost its mind, as we wrote two weeks ago on Forbes.com. We take it back. It’s worse: Higher education has lost its mind and its morality. Why? Because the monetary fruits of commercialized college sports have trumped the integrity of higher education, its obligation to provide a safe educational environment and its duty to demonstrate respect for human life.
But it is even more than that; we are morally injured because of those students that colleges and universities choose to place at risk. They didn’t pick the school’s national merit scholars or seniors about to graduate or graduate students conducting important research to be the guinea pigs to test campus openings. Whom did they choose? Who are these poor kids who were going to be financially better off or safer on campus than at their homes (a trope for not in the suburbs)? When are we going to tell Mr. and Mrs. Public that at the top 65 Division I football schools, football teams that are 46% Black are now practicing and risking Covid-19 cases so they can be prepared to entertain a student body that is 61% white and no more than 5% Black—and that these decisions are being made by a group of athletic directors and football coaches that is 75% and 80% white, respectively. This is why this latest offense is not just about choosing money over the lives of students. It is a continuation of a longstanding and sordid history of college revenue sports exploiting athletically talented Black athletes. We join in the refrain of Black Lives Matter, lamenting that college sports belongs in the same conversation as American policing, voter suppression and confederate monuments.
Compounding the problem, universities are forcing their student-athletes to sign health waivers and behavioral pledges before they are allowed to engage in supposedly “voluntary” summer workouts and preseason practices. Yes, you read that correctly. Public health officials have warned that it is not safe for college athletes to be playing again, and Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that “unless players are essentially in a bubble insulated from the community and they are tested every day, it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall.” These waivers and pledges require the athletes to acknowledge the Covid-19 risk, and at least one school, Southern Methodist University, has a waiver that reportedly requires the athlete to absolve the school and its employees from any legal claims related to the virus. Athletes who refuse to sign these waivers and pledges risk losing their scholarships. These waivers are coercive, are of questionable legality and are morally repugnant. Thankfully, this week Senators Richard Blumenthal and Cory Booker will introduce the College Athlete Pandemic Safety Act, which would outlaw such waivers.
It is well past time for our government to step in to address more than coronavirus-related exploitation issues. The NCAA continues to be AWOL, ignoring its governance responsibilities and paying lip service to its so-called commitment to athlete health and safety and education while acting as a trade association to maximize the revenues of its member institutions.
College athletes who are students rather than employees are without the collective bargaining agreements that protect professional athletes. No entity is left to protect them except Congress. They would be well served to have Congress engage in a comprehensive investigation into the need for collegiate athletics reform, such as that proposed by Representatives Donna Shalala (FL-D) and Ross Spano (FL-R). H.R. 5528, supported by a slate of bipartisan co-sponsors, would establish a Congressional Advisory Commission to execute a two-year investigation and propose remedies. It’s time to right the wrongs done to our college athletes and set intercollegiate sports onto a healthy, pro-education course.
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Donna A. Lopiano, PhD, is Adjunct Professor of Sports Management, Southern Connecticut State University, President of The Drake Group, and former Chief Executive Officer of the Women’s Sports Foundation and Director of Women’s Athletics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Andrew Zimbalist is the Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College and President-Elect of The Drake Group.
