When the first wave of Toledo athletes returned to campus earlier this month for voluntary workouts, a thoughtful environment awaited them.
Consider a day in the life of a Rockets football player.
To enter the Glass Bowl, he would have needed an appointment, a mask, and everything but the secret password. If his temperature was below 100.4 degrees and he passed a coronavirus screening questionnaire, he would have received a wristband dated and initialed by a university staffer, then joined no more than seven of his teammates for a training session.
He would have removed his mask only during distanced conditioning drills on the field or during his lifts in the weight room, where players were to space out every other rack and the six-feet-apart guidelines were so strict that not even a spotter was permitted. A 21-page COVID playbook instructed Rockets players to lift lighter weights “to eliminate the need.”
Toledo seemed to cover all the bases.
There was just one problem.
It failed to touch first.
For all of the precautions it took to foil the spread of the coronavirus, the university missed perhaps the most important defense of them all. It did not test the athletes upon their return.
Toledo was one of three schools in the Mid-American Conference that initially tested only athletes who showed symptoms, failing to account for the silent spread of an explosively contagious virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates at least a third of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic, while 40 percent of transmissions happen before people feel sick.
I checked in with three infectious disease experts, including Brian Fink, a professor of public health at UT. Surprise, none were on board with schools electing not to test — at minimum — their athletes on arrival.
“I’m really upset to hear that,” said Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University. “You shouldn’t mix up the best you can do with what needs to be done.”
Added Steven Goodman, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford: “The moment young people come back to campus is the moment you’re least sure about their status. If you’re at all concerned about the virus, I don’t see an argument for why you wouldn’t test.”
Well, I can think of about 10,000 possible reasons why, but that’s neither here nor there.
Or is it?
I write this not to hammer Toledo — although I believe it missed the mark — but to hammer home the complications of playing a college football season during a pandemic that betrays no signs of slowing.
When it comes to the biggest piece of the puzzle — the testing of players — there remains no coherent path forward, only a school-by-school jumble of policies and an unsettling new battleground in the collegiate arms race.
In a perfect world, players would be tested as often as possible, like in the NBA, which plans to test its athletes every day when the league restarts later this summer, and, likely, the NFL. I’m guessing you heard Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told CNN last week: “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 [pro] football is able to be played this fall.”
Obviously, none of that is practical for college football; neither the bubble nor the means to test every day. A more plausible recommendation: test all players upon their return to campus, then at least once per week once practice begins.
But a couple things:
■ Is that enough?: We’ve already seen outbreaks at Clemson (37 football players tested positive), LSU (30 players quarantined), and Texas (15 players tested/presumed positive), and that’s with players participating only in small group workouts on empty campuses. Imagine once full-contact practice begins on bustling grounds. Good luck.
■ Is that realistic?: It’s one thing to regularly test 100 players at Ohio State or Michigan, which, on second thought, could afford to test players every day. It’s another for schools in the MAC and other Group of Five conferences.
Suppose Toledo or BG tested all of its athletes in close-contact sports once per week. At more than $100 a pop, that could run them near seven figures at the same time they’re being asked to make significant cuts.
Fink, the UT epidemiologist who is not affiliated with the athletic department, called the frequent testing — and isolating of infected athletes — ”critical.”
“But,” he added, “can all schools afford to do this testing and so frequently? No.”
For now, a Blade survey of the MAC found eight schools have or intend to test all of their returning athletes, including Bowling Green, which is using nasal swabs that return results within 24 to 48 hours. The tests cost $120 each. (Like many schools, BG is unclear how much insurance will cover, and if it would cover regular testing of asymptomatic athletes in the future.)
Toledo — which began to bring its athletes back June 8, two weeks before BG — Ball State, and Kent State are testing only those who display symptoms. Akron has yet to reopen its athletic facilities and a spokesman said the university’s plans remain fluid.
As for future testing policies, the same fluidity goes for all the schools, which are recalibrating their plans by the day.
At Toledo, athletic director Mike O’Brien texted Monday: “Currently no plans to expand [testing], but waiting on further discussion from the MAC on their testing plan. We are weighing all options.”
By the end of the week, Toledo appeared to be trending toward more testing. Dr. Roger Kruse, the university’s head sports physician, said UT plans to test all athletes participating in contact sports two weeks before the start of their first practice. Beyond that there is no road map, but Kruse pledged: “I’m always going to do what is best for the student-athletes.”
What’s the balance between providing the safest possible environment and the safest practical — read: cost-effective — setting? “I think the balance comes with how many people get sick,” Kruse said. “If you get a bunch of symptomatic football players, then everything changes.”
O’Brien, too, said the safety of Toledo’s students is “the key to all of this.” A school spokesman said there have been no known cases among the 85 athletes on campus.
Now, to play devil’s advocate, I asked one of the experts: Would a college football season really be that unsafe?
To paraphrase one line of fan thinking — and I’m not suggesting most think this way — sure, these are amateur athletes, but they’re 18- to 22-year-olds in excellent physical condition. It is extremely unlikely an infected player would be hospitalized. What’s the big deal if a batch of largely asymptomatic cases runs through a team?
Well, if you ever wondered what would hit the rawest nerve of an epidemiologist ...
“You’re still creating new cases in a global pandemic, so — and you can print this — [expletive] you,” Binney said. “That really makes me quite angry.
“There are a few things to worry about here. Even if these players don’t get sick at all, you’re still creating a vector, another way for the virus to spread, and it could spread to older coaches, older athletic staff, older family members. What if somebody goes home to visit grandma and they didn’t know they were sick because they were young and asymptomatic? You’re still creating this risk and it’s not just for the players. When you deal with an infectious disease, your personal choices are never just your personal choices.
“Also it’s important to understand that while most young people seem to recover fine, there is still a lot we don’t know about the virus. Even in asymptomatic cases, we’re starting to see lung damage and potential other long-term organ damage that didn’t make itself known immediately. There’s the possibility that these young men and women who are elite athletes in peak physical shape, even a small degradation of that could be career altering. This isn’t just, ‘Hey, nobody died. No blood, no foul.’ It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
In other words, we’re all still flying blind.
I appreciate that as schools try to do the best they can with the resources they have, though only to a point.
Some costs of doing business are non-negotiable, and testing should be one of them. If there’s to be college football in 2020, our best chance is more, more, more testing, preferably via instant tests that are reasonably priced and administered at the same rate everywhere, but, at minimum, once per week, including in the MAC.
Maybe that’s pie in the sky.
But then maybe so are our visions of the autumn.
For as much as we all want a college season — and as much as every effort ought to be made to responsibly have one — it’s becoming hard not to wonder: Are we all just kidding ourselves?
First Published June 26, 2020, 8:11 p.m.
