College sports remain one of the biggest question marks of the fall, with campuses taking different approaches to opening all across the country. That lack of standardization is likely to be a major headache for those trying to organize athletic seasons.
There is another issue — the likelihood that a student-athlete contracts COVID-19. In an interview with CNN on Friday, NCAA president Mark Emmert weighed in on what he called an “almost inevitable” scenario.
“We have literally a half-million student athletes. We’ve got 1,100 different schools that participate in NCAA sports — 19,000 teams, not 32 (the number of teams in the NFL),” Emmert said, via Steve Berkowitz of USA TODAY. “So, to me, it’s not if a student comes down with the virus, it’s when. I think it’s almost inevitable with those kinds of numbers.
“And so you have to have in place the protocols for testing, for tracking symptoms, for tracking contact and the ability to quarantine individuals and those they’ve come in contact with when this occurs. Same thing with regular students. It’s impossible to believe that you can bring 40,000 students back to campus and all the faculty and staff and not have somebody sooner or later contract the virus. So it’s how you react to it that’s going to be critical.”
The NCAA has extensive guidelines on restarting sports, but it’s ultimately going to be up to each individual university on how to proceed. This uncertainty is why we simply don’t know what college football season will look like.
