Can Professional and College Team Sports Survive Covid-19?
As we pass through Spring without the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament, the final weeks of the NBA season, the start of professional baseball, and the beginning of the college and professional football training and practice camps in the era of Covid-19, the question inevitable arises:
Can team sports survive?
The answer is yes, and no.
The “no” side is simple.
The transmissibility of Covid-19 is so high, and the potential for infection and serious consequences are so great that no college or professional team can possibly risk the financial costs involved.
For example. an NFL team has 55 (up from 53 last year) active players, many are married or otherwise involved with significant others, all have families. They have as many 28 coaches. Trainers. Medical personnel, photographers, writers, laundry and cleaning staff, pilots, and so forth.
My hometown team, the Philadelphia Eagles, have 24 coaches, and another 225 or so additional employees, many of whom will have at least occasional contact with players. And of course, there are the 55 roster players and 12 practice squad players.
Given Covid-19’s transmissibility and the number of players and staff, the salary levels (the 2020 cap is $198.2 Million), and the potential for unsafe contact by 300 or so individuals, the financial and moral cost of playing a “season”, even without fans in the seats, is ludicrously high.
In addition to the obvious costs of losing one or more players to the disease, the cost of insurance, if any company is willing to underwrite, will certainly be prohibitive.
The same factors impact all college and professional team sports. Even if the owners, leagues, media and indeed, the players want to manufacture a season, will they be willing to do so without insurance coverage? Are they willing to assume the burden of years, even decades, of liability suits involving the medical costs and the un-necessary deaths that implies?
For once, I believe the money men will come to the rescue. There will be no team sports in the near future.
The “yes” side is complicated:
An effective, proven Covid-19 vaccine is the bottom line requirement. It’s relatively easy to require players and team personnel at all levels to have received it. Various vaccinations have been part of public health “requirements” for decades. When I went to college I was required to show proof of a variety of vaccinations. The same must be required of player’s families, staff and their families, etc. at all levels right down to kids playing T-Ball.
That solves the team level issue. Fans are another matter altogether.
The astro-turf “protests” against self-quarantine have already shown that well-funded extremist groups are more than willing to throw their followers into the fire to advance their agendas. A wide variety of racist, anti-vax, and other conspiracy motivated groups have already begun to organize to advance these agendas.
On the surface, the answer is simple: block-chain authenticated “health passports”. Your doctor authenticates the fact that you’ve been vaccinated, the passport is scanned when you enter a public space, and if it fails, you enjoy a brief vacation at public expense.
In practice, there will be “disturbance”.
My Opinion:
There will be no college team sports this season. There may not even be on-campus college at all. There might be professional team sports played in empty venues. The insurance companies will ultimately make that call.
I honestly hope I’m wrong. I want to see the Eagles and my Ohio State Buckeyes play in sold out stadiums. I want to go to a couple games. I still have hotel reservations for “The Game” in Columbus this fall.
I expect to cancel them.