More than a month ago, the Big Ten Conference announced that the fall sports season would be postponed because of the risk of exposing athletes and others to the coronavirus. “Our primary responsibility is to make the best possible decisions in the interest of our students, faculty, and staff,” Morton O. Schapiro, chairman of the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors and president of Northwestern University, said in a news release.
This week, the conference reversed that decision, announcing new medical protocols — including daily, rapid testing for the virus — that officials say will allow athletes and team staff members to practice and compete more safely. “Everyone associated with the Big Ten should be very proud of the groundbreaking steps that are now being taken to better protect the health and safety of the student-athletes and surrounding communities,” said Jim Borchers, head team physician at Ohio State University and co-chair of the NCAA subcommittee that devised the new testing measures.
Everyone associated with the Big Ten should be very proud of the groundbreaking steps that are now being taken to better protect the health and safety of the student-athletes and surrounding communities.
The new steps for football are the “platinum standard,” said Mercedes R. Carnethon, vice chair of Northwestern’s department of preventive medicine and a professor of epidemiology and pulmonary and critical care.
But the plan has raised questions among public-health experts and those who study college athletics. If universities are willing to adopt the “platinum standard” for some of their students, why not do so for all students, especially as cases climb on many campuses? And what does that discrepancy say about a system that claims athletes are just like their classmates and are primarily to be considered students, not unpaid performers?
Even with that testing regimen, there is no guarantee that the virus won’t spread quickly among athletes, Carnethon said, as it has among other students. “I don’t see a reality in which safe measures can be put in place to prevent the transmission of Covid,” she said.
How Many Tests?
Few campuses, in the conference or nationwide, are taking similarly rigorous steps for the rest of the student body.
Among the Big Ten’s members — 14 in all— only the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tests all students on a regular schedule. Michigan State and Rutgers Universities, on the other hand, have essentially closed their campuses to most students and moved nearly all instruction online for the semester.
At Illinois, undergraduates must be tested twice per week, and graduate students and faculty members at least once a week. While the university has seen some small spikes in coronavirus cases, the positivity rate of those tests has remained below 3 percent over all and was just 0.38 percent for the past week, according to the university’s dashboard.
Other universities have had some success in limiting the spread of the coronavirus with regular testing.
Purdue University is using a surveillance testing schedule that includes random tests for on-campus students and a combination of random and weekly tests for certain on-campus employees, with the goal of testing approximately 10 percent of the campus’s population each week. Purdue has reported fewer than 600 positive cases since August 1 and a positivity rate just below 3 percent.
Other conference members, including the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, are not requiring any students or employees to be tested. Instead, they are relying on people to voluntarily seek tests if they show symptoms of Covid-19 or know they have been exposed to someone who has tested positive. Iowa has reported nearly 2,000 positive cases of Covid-19.
The number is less than 700 at Nebraska, but the university is reporting the results of just 4,000 tests in all. The risk of the coronavirus’s spread in the city and surrounding county remains high, according to the county health department.
Even with robust testing, some coronavirus outbreaks have occurred on Big Ten campuses. The University of Wisconsin at Madison moved all instruction online from September 10 to 25, and ordered students in two residence halls to quarantine for two weeks, after the rate of positive coronavirus tests passed 20 percent on two consecutive days. The university is regularly testing all students who live in residence halls and weekly surveillance testing of off-campus students, according to Meredith McGlone, a spokesperson.
The conference will pay for tests of football players, McGlone said, so the athletics protocols won’t use up resources for the rest of the student body.
“We don’t expect the testing of student-athletes to detract from our ability to perform the campus’s other testing centers, conduct regular screening of housing residents, or run a surveillance testing program for staff, faculty, and off-campus students,” McGlone said in an email.
Northwestern’s athletics director, James J. Phillips, said that the decision to test football players had been made “not with a lot of dialogue and not with an awful lot of reflection on what that would mean” for other students, according to The Daily Northwestern.
Football Is Different
But taking special testing and health measures for football players undermines the common argument that athletes, especially football and basketball players, are just like other students, said Victoria Jackson, a clinical assistant professor of sports history at Arizona State University.
College presidents and NCAA officials often make that argument to oppose paying players or giving them the opportunity to organize labor unions. But athletes in the revenue sports of football and basketball know how much money they are earning for the athletics department and to support other teams, Jackson said.
Now their burden has increased, Jackson said, because they are being asked to perform under the threat of the coronavirus. “I just think it’s time to do the right thing and admit that football is different,” she said.
One big question, Jackson said, is whether the conference’s members will dedicate similar funds to bring back sports besides football. “Now they’ve set the standard for what returning to sports safely looks like,” she said, “will they put these in place for the other sports in the Big Ten?”
Carnethon, the epidemiologist at Northwestern, said the decision to hold a fall football season after all also brings up issues of racial equity.
Nearly two-thirds of college football players in Division I identify as Black or some other nonwhite group — Black and Hispanic Americans have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus — and they are being asked to perform at universities that are predominantly white.
In addition, a statement by the NCAA mentioned collecting coronavirus data from the athletes and a possible connection to myocarditis, a heart condition. “The data we are going to collect from testing and the cardiac registry will provide major contributions for all 14 Big Ten institutions as they study Covid-19 and attempt to mitigate the spread of the disease among wider communities,” Borchers was quoted as saying in the news release.
But that statement echoed the troubling history of medical experiments carried out on people of color without their consent in the United States, Carnethon said. In this case, athletes may have very little choice about whether or not to play, if they want to preserve their scholarships or favor with coaches who could heavily influence their opportunities to play professionally.
“The optics are poor,” said Carnethon, herself a former college athlete. “It’s starting to look like a scene out of Gladiator.”
