Unverified Voracity Just Isn't Going To Work
Let's remember some guys, 1970s Kentucky edition. Run, don't walk, to this reminiscence about a reminiscence about the 1954 Kentucky-Tennessee game:
There's a miraculous punt. You know you want it.
[After THE JUMP: you can want college football to happen but I don't think the virus is going to cooperate.]
Man, I just don't think it's gonna work. College football looks like they're going to try to have a season during what's going to be the pandemic's second wave. I just don't see how that's going to happen. There's a strong disconnect between this reality…
"I think it's unrealistic to think that we won't have positive tests on campus and positive tests in locker rooms," Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby told ESPN. "Somebody somewhere is going to have that occur, and they'll have to deal with it."
…and what happens after. If one person on a football team has it chances are a large number will. Either that or there won't be anyone practicing:
This would be of interest to me if I was, say, a strength coach preparing to welcome players back to campus in the coming weeks. https://t.co/CLFaRm0OWv
— Zach Barnett (@zach_barnett) May 20, 2020
Socially distanced line splits aren't going to work. Football might as well be purpose-designed to spread respiratory disease.
There's definitely evidence that vocal projection, particularly yelling as meat packing workers have to over the din of the line, increases transmission. https://t.co/D74KVh3opm
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 12, 2020
When teams get infected it won't be one person, it'll be 40. And while players are not in a high-risk group there are many coaches who are.
It seems inevitable that when someone on a team comes down with COVID-19 that the result will be game cancellations.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, answered that question earlier this week when asked by NBC’s Peter King what might happen if four players tested positive. “You got a problem there,” Fauci told King. “You know why? Because it is likely that if four of them are positive and they’ve been hanging around together, that the other ones that are negative are really positive. So I mean, if you have one outlier (only one player testing positive), I think you might get away. But once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it’s spread within a team, you got a real problem. You gotta shut it down.”
Teams will get knocked out for two games, three games, whatever. The season will dissolve into a farce.
Also in this skepticism. The NBA is thinking about having everything at a single neutral site. That's how far they have to go. You're not going to be able to do this for people who are supposedly not employees and are supposed to be part of a university community.
FWIW. Harbaugh on playing:
“To answer your question, heck yeah I’d be comfortable coaching a game without any fans. If the choice were play in front of no fans or not play, then I would choose to play in front of no fans. And darn near every guy I’ve talked to on our team, that’s the way they feel about it.”
Today in "can athletic directors count?" Central Michigan axed its men's track and field team. One small problem:
The NCAA requires FBS athletic departments to field at least 16 programs across various sports, including six men's programs.
CMU now has 16 total programs, including just five men's sports, meaning the university will need to add a men's program or receive a waiver from the NCAA.
CMU is paying football head coach Jim McElwain 700k. Cutting track and field will save CMU 600k. The NCAA should absolutely not offer CMU a waiver as long as anyone in that athletic department is making six figures. CMU is prioritizing bloated salaries over scholarship athletes.
Gordon Gee: still Gordon Gee. Strong Michael Scott energy from former OSU and current WVU president Gordon Gee:
"We need to learn to dance with the pandemic rather than being fearful of it," West Virginia president Gordon Gee said. "We have moved from 'The Hammer,' which I call where we just locked everything down, to what I call 'The Dance.'"
Like a whole lot of people, Gee probably read the viral Medium post that terminology is lifted from. Or at least had it described to him by an underling.
Chaundee Brown is optimistic about his waiver. Andrew Kahn talked to him:
"I'm in the process of (applying for) my waiver right now," Brown said. "It's looking like I'm going to play next season."
He did not expand on his optimism but said he very much prefers to suit up sooner rather than later.
Brown's former AAU coach:
"No one knows for sure," Ricks, the AAU coach, said of Brown's chances of receiving a waiver. "It's up to the NCAA. With the mass exodus at Wake Forest (four players transferred this offseason) and coaching change along with a few other things, we think he has a good case. It's up to the NCAA though."
Who's ready to spin the Wheel Of Waivers?
Also in transfers. More on Nojel Eastern's odd situation from Brendan Quinn:
Last week, Purdue transfer Nojel Eastern also committed to Michigan. The junior made his announcement on Twitter, but as of Tuesday afternoon— five days after the fact — Michigan had yet to announce Eastern’s addition.
According to two sources, Eastern is not yet enrolled in the university and his potential addition is an ongoing process that is not yet close to being completed. There is not total clarity on the status of his transfer to Michigan.
There's no urgency to enroll, I suppose, but "an ongoing process that is not yet close to being completed" sounds like a long way from a sure thing.
It's a shotgun world. The revolution continues apace:
Percentage of plays run from shotgun among all FBS teams:
— PFF College (@PFF_College) May 20, 2020
2014: 70.3%
2015: 72.2%
2016: 74.9%
2017: 77.7%
2018: 78.4%
2019: 79.7% pic.twitter.com/oglRfCrvYc
Surprise! Jim Heckman drives another sports media property into the ground:
This is from today's SEC filing which is from Q3 of 2018 because they are that far behind in massaging all of their bullshit. If you're a finance/private equity, you can take a look here. Would love an opinion on everything going on.https://t.co/hBhMjzXFit https://t.co/iUanlrYd9v
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) May 18, 2020
I'm sure he managed to extract personal wealth out of this fiasco like he always does.
Etc.: London game against UK pushed to 2022. This blog is duty bound to link any and all Tim Beckman content. Danny Manning on Brown.
The moist, warm atmosphere...can cause more dense transmission of droplets.
Am I going crazy, or is this in direct opposition to the narrative a few months ago that transmission was faster in cold air?
Can we all agree, whether you're a safety 1st or an economy 1st person, that the science is evolving on this virus?!
If nothing else, can we agree on THAT!?
Very few, if any are "economy first" proponents no matter how often it gets framed that way. There are let's take reasonable measures and precautions, while protecting the most vulnerable, without continuing to crater the economy, and creating a whole bunch of non-covid health issues, proponents.
I think that would be true if were talking about "economy only" people. Sure there are few if any of those.
But it's fair to characterize some people as economy first, i.e. many people who think we are too far on the safety side of things and want to swing the pendulum more towards the economy.
The same could be said of those who are "safety first". It often gets framed as if they don't care about job losses and portfolios but there are very few if any of those people either.
It's unreasonable to expect everyone would agree on the right balance. What I do find interesting, is that no one seems to be interested enough in optimizing the balance by testing, contact tracing, etc.
Instead of arguing over whether we should open or not, and who should be getting stimulus, why aren't we demanding more accessibility to testing and contact tracing that would allow us to both reduce deaths and jumpstart the economy (because let's face it, opening things without people being able to feel safe doesn't do much)?
Regarding your last point, exactly! Countries like South Korea and New Zealand and Taiwan realize that safety helps prevent your economy from shutting down in the first place and/or to get it running again. When you have relative safety, people can operate relatively normally. In places like America or Brazil, there's neither. I feel like this needs to be repeated ad infinitum for the weird Sweden worship, but there are a lot more people going to bars and restaurants and hair salons in Korea than in Sweden.
Just look at the Tyson meatpacking plant in Iowa. They probably wouldn't have needed to shut down if they were proactive with protection and testing and distancing. Instead, they said fuck that we need to make money, and then they had to shut down because everyone was getting sick.
The government is workng on it.
https://thehill.com/homenews/coronavirus-report/498668-cdc-director-says-us-ready-to-reopen-predicts-thousands-more?utm_source=thehill&utm_medium=widgets&utm_campaign=es_recommended_content
Yours took way more words than mine, shoes!
Everyone knew EXACTLY who "economy 1st" referred to, any further elaboration is just semantics.
Unless you were hoping a "safety 1st" proponent would reply with an equally exhaustive description of what "safety 1st" really means?
And then we could start another 300+ post thread debating it?!
Pass!
No, I think the connotations and emotional responses (that we all have and have been conditioned to) to the terms are important here. "Safety First" always has had (or at least since about the 1960s) a positive connotation- and we learned that from first grade on. Who isn't for safety? Similarly "economy first" harkens to - the robber barons and "we don't care if the mine walls collapse because the owners didn't encourage shoring them up if it slowed mining. " That view did exist- a long time ago.
I agree with you that a nuanced discussion of what is the proper balance would be welcome, but I have seen too often, including on this board, an inference that those who disagreed with the most stringent restrictions were uncaring selfish people.
And as I noted there are safety issues attendant to the more stringent restrictions as well (mental health issues, screening for non-covid issues etc).
One thing we should be able to agree on with this subject is that nobody really knows anything on either side. Not nearly enough data yet. I have a strong opinion on the debate, but I'd be a fool if I thought my opinion was definitive
I think it more has to do with inside vs. outside. Outside, a more humid/dense environment would naturally force droplets down to the ground. Inside, it seems that you'd want to keep the air moving and get it filtered/replaced with clean air. Also seems to me that over-saturation in a moist, warm atmosphere would limit the droplets ability to soak into the environment, maybe causing the droplets to be able to be kicked back up into the air?
I find this dubious, but I was talking to a hospital director recently during a chance encounter (not trying to pretend I'm important; it was truly random), and I was told COVID-19 is a "heavy virus" and it generally only travels up to 2 feet in the air. I think the reason I find this dubious is pretty obvious, but I'll expand: if your spit and water droplets travel more than 2 feet, I don't know why the virus would stop at 24".
But that's what I was told.
"generally travels two feet" could easily mean just via breathing. the whole six feet thing likely came from sneeze distance.
Yo man....that comment...NSFWFH -- or more likely, I've been self-isolating for far too long :)
Sure, if the moisture in the air is literally droplets from heavy breathing, yelling, etc. then there would necessarily be more density of potential virus carrying droplets in the air. But I don't think that moisture from water vapor does anything but slow transmission by making droplets more dense and hence bringing them to the ground faster: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/09/830297538/scientists-try-to-figure-out-if-summer-will-slow-the-spread-of-covid-19
I've not seen anything about cold vs hot air as being positive or negative - keeping humidity constant. But the likelihood of droplets turning airborne is higher in dry air because droplets evaporate into lighter, airborne versions, whereas they pick up moisture and fall to the ground faster in more humid air.
Cold, winter air or air-conditioned air does tend to be more dry so that's where colder air is associated with spread.
It is interesting to see the comment about "turbulence" in the air contributing to spread. I've theorized without seeing any commentary on it, that movement of air among a large group of people could serve to distribute particles from a carrier far beyond six feet. Ventilation and replacement of air is great but when air is mostly just recirculating like in a room or to some extent in a bowl shaped stadium, turbulence can probably be a bad thing.
The cold portion is likely because people tend to cluster more in cold weather. Moisture is also likely helpful for transmission. The standard flu has higher transmission rates in temperate regions during their rainy seasons. Inside vs. outside would depend on how quickly UV light has an effect combined with fresh vs. recirculated air.
CMU is paying football head coach Jim McElwain 700k. Cutting track and field will save CMU 600k. The NCAA should absolutely not offer CMU a waiver as long as anyone in that athletic department is making six figures. CMU is prioritizing bloated salaries over scholarship athletes.
So, I think I agree here, I'm just thinking about what the steps for CMU would be then. Say you decide to go down the path of tightening the belt on football and you commit to keeping all of CMU's coaches under $100k salaries (for example), well then you're basically going to have a DII or DIII staff coaching up there which will eventually lead to the team spiraling into an even bigger money loser. Might as well just cancel football now. I assume pretty much every sport at every level of college loses money except for the relatively rare top level football, basketball, etc. programs. so then you're just trying to decide how much money is appropriate to commit to an athletic department that operates in the red. I don't really have a solution, it just seems like axing football doesn't make an athletic department profitable, no? It just makes it a smaller expense, then you're talking about why do we have college sports at all? Especially the ones no one watches.
I'm coming from a bit different place than that. The entire history is too long, but my family has been involved with the University & with Michigan Athletics for nearly a century.
My grandfather went from being a 50+ year season ticket holder in virtually every sport, to being so against what football & basketball had become by the time of his passing, he would argue that ONLY the sports that don't make money are worthy of University support.
The "non-revenue" sports are being played by "student-athletes" - in his view the lessons of team, struggle, work, discipline, camaraderie, alma mater being instilled are the valuable part of having athletics as a part of student life.
It's becoming a more fashionable idea these days, but he thought the schools which wished to have commercially viable athletics without the guise of it being an activity for students should just do that. Call it what it is, don't make students spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, Spring Break, etc away from family & college student activities.
One old fogies views, passed down to someone who's now entering fogiedom himself.
I think your grandfather was 100% correct.
That's very kind, thank you!
And on a related topic, I'm all for the athletes getting their part of these billions, but the NIL are going to kill any camaraderie & Team First mentality that may still exist.
Could it possibly be DPJ's fault he was passed by Ronnie Bell in targets, did he not work as hard?
Or did Shea & Bell have a deal? Every target is worth $x back to the QB...
If it was my money being messed with, I know which theory I'd go with! And it wouldn't be my fault!
I think you are correct that what seems to be an attractive solution- the NIL, can have unintended and unforeseen consequences and implications.
I'm only in my mid-30s, but if this view is "fogiedom", you can start calling me an old fogie.
I'm a huge Michigan fan and love College Football, but I've felt dirtier and dirtier supporting it the last few years for reasons that you and your grandfather have articulated well.
"...well then you're basically going to have a DII or DIII staff coaching up there which will eventually lead to the team spiraling into an even bigger money loser."
Why would that be the case? The reason CMU, WMU, EMU, etc are each losing $15 million or more per year for athletics is because they are trying to compete (at least somewhat) with the big boys by paying millions for football and basketball coaching staffs, while also giving scholarships to hundreds of athletes.
If they were DIII, the coaches would be paid much, much less -- for example, $29,495 a piece. That highly specific number came from Hope College (which has 94 kids playing football -- zero of whom have a scholarship, another huge savings).
It is crazy so many commenters on this blog think you can only have big time college sports. Not every school can be Michigan or Michigan State. There are literally hundreds of schools with very active college sports programs that students & alumni enjoy who don't lost millions each year.
https://athletics.hope.edu/information/eada/2018-2019_EADA_Final_Report.pdf
Giving scholarships to hundreds of non-revenue athletes is certainly a reason they're losing so much money but does paying coaches create a net negative? Previous poster is suggesting the ROI on paying revenue sport coaches is positive. That's the key: determining what is the net cost/benefit of the scholarships and what is the net cost/benefit of the revenue sport strategy to compete.
I don't know the answer to that but let's assume if you don't pay a coach 700k and instead pay someone 100k, your team, and probably eventually your conference will make fewer bowls, draw fewer fans, not get TV deals, not get NCAA tourney money, etc.
The real comparison should be how much does Hope spend on their AD and is the difference worth the scholarships?
The bulk, if not all of that $15 million is going to scholarships (and perhaps more than that) so that has real value. Being able to pay for kids educations is important to schools. They may decide, yes, we would rather spend $15 million on providing scholarships for hundreds of kids and try to subsidize those losses with football revenue than to spend $3 million on athletics but not give any scholarships.
Yes. But what determines the cost of the scholarship? Artificially inflated tuition costs which are ridiculously high. It’s smoke and mirrors.
Ncaa tourney money? What does that have to do with football? And fewer bowls? I bet Mac teams have mostly lost money on bowls. There are lots of articles about how these lower schools are pulling money from general education funds but people keep imagining there's just millions of dollars coming in on crap like ROI for McElwain without any proof.
It'll happen but there won't be any fans in the stands
I've never heard a single person state why we can't have fans in the stands under a scenario like this: M stadium holds 100,000: just like when restaurants re-open, state that the new capacity for games at M is 33,000, and people have to have three seats apart from each group of 2 or 4. Why not?
First of all, have you been to Michigan Stadium? Even if you went every third seat in each row, you're no more than two feet away from four different people and less then six feet away from almost a dozen more because you have rows in front and behind you. Not to mention the queues to the gates, to get into your section, constant turnover of hundreds of people in the same tiny, enclosed bathrooms, etc. There's just no good way to do it. It's impossible to have any sort of social distancing.
The only way to have any meaningful social distancing would be 5,000-10,000 fans at most. At that point why even bother.
10k fans still make a decent noise to give the players some atmosphere and feedback
I think it's quite possible with planning, to get 20-30k into the stadium, where I've been many times. And since there is no science whatsoever behind the six feet distance rule (for example the WHO recommends one meter) I think people can relax a bit with distance, outdoors.
Well, there is science behind the distancing recommendations, but as far as I'm aware it's applicable to airborne respiratory disease and respiratory droplets in general, not specifically SARS-CoV-2. Source: this post which talks about the amount of virus particles released by a cough/sneeze/breath, and references several scientific publications about respiratory diseases like the 2003 SARS to support that info.
As far as putting people in a stadium, I think it's much higher risk than sitting 6 feet apart from people while picnicking in a park or something. The fans will be cheering and yelling to create noise, which would project virus particles a lot farther than simply breathing or talking. Add in the cold Michigan fall weather and you'll have people coughing more, which also projects the virus droplets farther. Sitting there for several hours for a football game also maximizes exposure time if there does happen to be an infected person sitting nearby.
I do agree with your point though that I think people can relax a bit with distance outdoors. There have been some pre-print (not yet peer reviewed) studies lately that saw the vast majority of traced COVID-19 outbreaks occurred from prolonged exposure within confined spaces. I just think having fans at a football game is higher risk than most normal life activities, so there will need to be greater spacing between people, and it could be problematic if people are trying to move closer to the field to get a better view instead of sitting in their assigned spots. Not to mention you'll get groups of friends going to sit together, increasing risk from contact with people outside their household, and they'll have to consider whatever risk it adds outside the stadium from having thousands of fans traveling to and from the game, tailgating, etc. A number lower than 20-30k, maybe 5-10k, is probably more realistic.
CMU is prioritizing bloated salaries over scholarship athletes.
Well yeah but as long as no one can pay an athlete for his autograph we can all keep touting amateurism.
“The NCAA should absolutely not offer CMU a waiver as long as anyone in that athletic department is making six figures.”
I don’t say this lightly, but that might be the worst sports take I have ever read.
Good luck finding a football or basketball head coach willing to go to CMU for $99,999. They will have to go get a JV high school coach. Not to mention no athletic director would ever work at a D1 college for that amount. Just plain stupid.
People do a lot of things for that amount of money or much less. So I bet they find someone fairly easily and it's apparently all they can afford so I don't see the problem.
Even Coastal Carolina paid its coach $360,000 in salary for the 2018-2019 season. CMU will not find a competent coach for 5 figures.
https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/
Men's basketball data is incomplete, but the lowest amount is $275K at South Dakota State.
https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/mens-basketball/coach
AD's aren't even close
https://athleticdirectoru.com/articles/17-18-fbs-ad-compensation/
Your thinking is a category error: you are correct that in order to get D1 coaches for football or basketball (or hockey, volleyball or soccer etc at certain campuses) you need to spend millions of dollars. The floor is mid-six figures for head coaches, and that's not counting staff.
The solution is not "Well, CMU students & Michigan taxpayers: I guess at least $15 million of what you give us every year has to go to people like Jim McElwain. Otherwise, you'll lose him to another MAC school."
The solution is to go to DII or DIII sports. GVSU (a school that has grown the past 10 years, unlike CMU, WMU and EMU) pays their head coach $161,160.
If you can't afford to do something, consistently, you no longer should be able to do it.
States are going to have record-deficits and schools are dealing with potentially catastrophic drops in enrolled students and thus tuition. Spending tens of millions on athletics is not sustainable and not right.
CMU may very well go back to DII, but that's ancillary to what Brian said. Brian's statement is that the NCAA shouldn't grant CMU a waiver until no one in the Athletic Department makes $100K+.
For next year, CMU still plans to be a division 1 school and they will need competent coaches and a competent AD. They will not find those things for under $100K in salary. Even at the DII level, I think it would be hard to do for an AD.
i love love love michigan football. i'll be very disappointed if i don't see it, and soon.
but i agree - spending milllions of dollars this way, in my opinion, goes against the very core principles of the capital-letter University, not only at cmu but our beloved university of michigan as well.
yes, i know the athletic department quote-unquote "funds" itself. that is simply not a guaranteed nor permanent condition. for example - the ohio state (ohio state!) athletic department lost somewhere between one and ten million dollars last year (https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/bigten/2020/02/14/ohio-state-athletic-revenue-210-million-but-department-lost-money/4760028002/).
if u of m starts bleeding $10 million a year in the athletic department...is it worth it? is it right? i'll say yes, selfishly, but i do hesitate. and if i hesitate at u of m, i'm sure as hell going to hesitate at central michigan.
You're correct that they wouldn't be able to get anyone that would travel constantly to recruit and they wouldn't make bowl games, but if they didn't mind going 2-10 every year, they could get a steady stream of competent coaches from high schools and lower levels to do a decent job for under 100k (which would be almost double what that coach was getting to teach and coach in HS).
Yeah, this has been my take for a while and while I get the “play with no fans argument”, I’m not sure I see it. Not that it will take this long for a team to become infected, but can you imagine if UM has 12 guys out before the OSU game or Alabama before the Iron Bowl? There is no way those games get played. Then what do you do? What if OSU gets hit hard and only plays 6 games but is undefeated and UM plays 9 with losses? Also remember that the players are kids and most of the coaches are batshit nuts. They will never report symptoms and will try and play at all costs. Do you think if Trevor Lawrence has a “slight” fever but feels ok, they won’t play him in a big game? The chaos would be pretty amazing to see though.
This is an excellent point. The "play at almost all costs" mentality of football does not mesh well with our current situation. It's one thing to strain your already-injured knee. It's another thing entirely to risk killing another player.
A college football player is not at risk for dying from Covid based on anything I've seen. They are at risk for death, paralysis or other permanent injury from contact however and we haven't yet discussed switching college football to flag football (maybe we should).
They are however at risk of being asymptomatic carriers.
And that sort of intense close quarter activity would certainly have the opportunity to turn 4 such ppl into 40 such ppl in about a few days.
Quarantine them all & let's PLAY!
Like schreibee said, I think the point isn't that any given player would put himself at grave risk by playing through covid symptoms. It's that guys pushing to play through infection would mean that any isolated infection would stand a good chance of turning into a much larger outbreak -- which could make the whole system less tenable given risks to coaching and support staffs and broader university communities.
The posters above are right that an outbreak caused by a game is the bigger worry. But at least 45 Americans in their twenties had died from it by April 13th. And it's killed some teenagers too. I agree that it's not likely to kill a college football player, but it could.
How many of those 45 were free from significant co-morbid conditions?
1) 45 out of (likely) millions is a really small percent and 2) those 45 mostly had underlying health conditions that fit athletes don't have.
The risk to the players is extremely small. Probably a lower risk that what the actual football poses, because actual football also kills players, to the other guys point. But yeah, it's contagious and coaches and community members are at much higher risk.
The statistics from China showed, at least at one point, that there was a 0.2% mortality rate for people age 10-29 who were infected. Many of the 0.2% likely had other health problems, but that isn't necessary to die from the virus. And the infection rate among players is likely to be high for the reasons discussed here. There's a decent chance you end up with a dead player if 100-plus D1 teams practice and play for thirteen weeks.
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