PRESS EDITORIAL: College football marketing trumps public health

The Big Ten Conference made the right decision for the right reasons.
    That was the Aug. 11 decision, the one made by the presidents of the universities in the conference who heeded the advice of health scientists and voted to postpone all fall sports to impede the spread of the coronavirus. The decision by a league representing some of the country’s most respected educational institutions, including its largest public universities, was a meaningful defensive measure in the pandemic battle and, considering the popularity of college football, a move that exhibited courageous leadership.
    Then last week, the same university administrators overruled their own decision and voted to start the Big Ten football season on Oct. 24.
    It was a craven surrender to the influence of sports money, alumni donors, political pressure and the Covid belittlers, anti-maskers and social distancing defiers who railed against the Big Ten sports postponement on social media.
    The presidents defended their reversal on the grounds that testing had improved enough to forestall virus outbreaks among teams. But it was a weak rationale in the face of the facts that the pandemic had only become worse in the month since the original decision and that college campuses are now places of explosive contagion.
    The virus has spread with particular velocity at Big Ten schools. Indiana University, Rutgers and the University of Maryland have had to suspend most in-person classes. Michigan State has shut down its campus, providing only online classes and telling students to quarantine for 14 days. In Wisconsin, the UW campus, the city of Madison and Dane County have become Covid hotspots.
    Elsewhere, 75 players on the Texas Tech football team have been infected, and most of the players on the Louisiana State University team have tested positive for Covid-19, according to its coach.
    Any notion that student athletes traveling over a broad swath of states to play their games will not be spreading the coronavirus cannot not be taken seriously.
    Big Ten universities are, of course, businesses, and their products are sports, especially football, which reaps millions. The athletic director of Ohio State (or THE Ohio State University, as its players speaking on TV and some boastful alumni are wont to call it) whined that his department would lose $50 million if the football season weren’t started.
    Leaders of other schools’ sports programs no doubt had similar fears. How would they pay the multi-million-dollar salaries of coaches? How would they keep well-healed donors interested in sending checks?
    The Big Ten caved to big money—and other pressure. President Donald Trump, imagining he had the power to do it, ordered the Big Ten to start playing football. Wisconsin legislators joined those of other states in signing a letter pushing for football games because athletes “are losing a vital part of student life and becoming less marketable with each passing week.”  
    Only in a world of twisted priorities could the “marketing” of jocks rank as more important than public health and the health of college athletes, their fellow students and their families.
    The Big Ten conference and its member universities are not the only powerful institutions that are failing to lend their influence to support efforts medical experts say are needed to prevent the worsening of the pandemic. Milwaukee County health authorities expressed dismay when Archbishop Jerome Listecki ordered Catholics to start regularly attending Sunday Masses again or suffer the consequences of committing a “grave sin.” The order was accompanied by the lifting of a restriction limiting church attendance to 25% of capacity.
    Meanwhile, modeling by Dr. Ali Mokdad, head of the University of Washington health metrics department, whose predictions of Covid-19 fatalities have been spot-on, shows that without behavioral changes in society 415,090 Americans will be dead as a result of the disease by next year.
    Asked what to do about college football by the New York Times, he said, “Don’t play. As much as I want to see football games, the question at the end of the day is, at what price.”