For four quarters, at least, Graham Mertz, the quarterback for the University of Wisconsin, lived as if dreaming. A lanky red-shirt freshman, Mertz took the field for his first start as a Badger, in the Big Ten Conference’s season opener, on Friday, October 23rd, against the University of Illinois, and completed his first pass attempt, a gain of three yards. His second attempt gained twelve. His third, a pretty touch pass, went for a touchdown. Mertz completed his fourth attempt, his fifth, his sixth. He followed a conservative strategy, mostly screens and short passes, but grew more daring. He rolled out on a play fake and threw a touchdown off his back foot. He whipped another over the middle, a precise dart into the end zone. With less than a minute to go in the first half, he launched a fifty-three-yard touchdown pass to a streaking wide receiver. By then, he was fourteen for fourteen, with four touchdowns—he threw the ball seventeen times before he missed a target, and only then because the ball was dropped. (Graciously, he blamed himself.) He finished the game twenty for twenty-one, with five touchdowns. Patrick Mahomes, the best quarterback in the world, tweeted his amazement. J. J. Watt, the three-time N.F.L. defensive player of the year, posted a video of a man using a flamethrower, in tribute. Wisconsin won, 45–7.
In a normal season, the freshman quarterback would have looked up to see eighty thousand people cheering for him, chanting and singing and calling his name. But this was not a normal season. The cold metal bleachers were bare, and the cheers that followed each of his touchdowns were fake. When the song “Jump Around” played before the fourth quarter, the small cluster of cardboard cutouts that had been installed in the stands did not jump. When it’s empty, Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium has about as much charm as an old airport concourse. But a touchdown is still a touchdown, even if no crowd makes a sound. “He was smiling cheek to cheek after the first touchdown,” the tight end Jake Ferguson said of Mertz afterward. “He knew, and everyone in that huddle knew, that we were rolling.”
Two days later, Mertz tested positive for the coronavirus. Then it was reported that Wisconsin’s backup quarterback had tested positive as well. By midweek, the number of positive tests within the football program was up to twelve, and included the head coach—and the team’s next game, against the University of Nebraska, was cancelled. A week later, the number of cases on the team was up to twenty-seven. Two players for Illinois also tested positive, although it was unclear if they were infected during the game or somewhere else entirely. Wisconsin’s next game, against Purdue, was called off.
Purdue vs. Wisconsin was one of ten top-tier college-football games that was postponed or cancelled that weekend. The Badgers returned to the field a week later, on November 14th, routing Michigan, but fifteen other games were not played as originally scheduled that weekend, including four of seven games that were to have featured teams from the powerhouse Southeastern Conference (S.E.C.). So far, more than eighty games have been cancelled, and several conferences are only a few weeks into their schedules. But the season has rolled on, even as coronavirus cases have skyrocketed across the country. If we could say definitively, in precise and dramatic detail, that the former was connected to the latter, then presumably universities would face public pressure to stop the games. But this is probably the wrong way to think about life during a pandemic. And the approach that we have taken to college football likely reflects our broader failure to grasp what it takes to shut down the virus.
Back in August, the Big Ten announced that it was postponing its football season until the spring. Players had begun returning for workouts in June, and team after team around the country had suffered outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2. There were reports of athletes suffering serious long-term effects—an anguished Facebook post written by the mother of one player, which described her son’s struggle with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle that can follow a viral infection, shook many within the sport.
The Big Ten is the oldest conference in the country and includes some of the largest and most respected universities in the world. The decision to call off the season was hugely costly—the conference was in the middle of a multi-billion-dollar television deal—and hugely unpopular. But the concerns prompting it were grave, and many people expected the rest of the so-called Power Five conferences to follow suit, as the Pac-12 did, just hours later. The season appeared to be on the brink of cancellation.
It turned out that there is no more unity in college football than there is in the rest of the country. Not all medical experts agreed about the riskiness of playing. Some parents of players protested the Big Ten’s decision. Players sued. Commentators railed about the decision on sports radio. A player labor movement merged with, and then morphed into, a movement to play the season. The President of the United States mocked the conference on Twitter. The rest of the Power Five—the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the S.E.C., which, collectively, are home to fourteen of the last fifteen national champions—were not inclined to defer to the Big Ten, and announced that they were going ahead with games. Football brings in more than a hundred million dollars in revenue to top schools, and, although the financial impact for smaller programs is less clear, athletic departments generally depend on money from football. Programs had not stashed away revenue for a rainy day or a pandemic. They had spent it—on other sports, expensive coaches, and lavish facilities.
The season began without the Big Ten. Some players got sick, others tested positive without showing symptoms, and still others were held out while contact tracing was being conducted. Several big games were cancelled, but enough were played to make it appear that something like a full season would eventually be completed. A couple of weeks after the nation’s first game had been played, the commissioner of the Big Ten, Kevin Warren, announced that the conference’s member schools had taken another vote: the Big Ten would resume playing football at the end of October. The Pac-12 soon released a similar statement, as did smaller conferences that had also put off playing. All but a handful of teams across the country would participate in the season.
Big Ten university presidents said that the reversal was prompted by new medical advice. The conference had enlisted a private company to provide daily rapid tests to all teams; experts had provided stringent health and safety guidelines. There was evidence that heart complications might be rarer in athletes than had been feared—and doctors and researchers had developed a screening protocol for detecting myocarditis.
There was truth to all of this, but it was not the whole story. While some medical experts believed that you could find a safe-enough way to play, most epidemiologists and public-health professors I spoke to were not in favor of it. What had really changed between August and September was that college football had come back without the Big Ten, outbreaks had happened, and there had been little outcry. By the time that the Big Ten resumed play, in late October, Notre Dame, Florida, Cincinnati, and several other ranked teams had all had coronavirus clusters. The L.S.U. head coach, Ed Orgeron, casually mentioned that “most” of his players had contracted it during the summer. (He seemed to frame this as a plus, because the team presumably wouldn’t need to worry as much about the virus as the season went on; two months later, the team’s game against Alabama was postponed after more members of the program tested positive.) Jamain Stephens, a defensive tackle at a Division II school outside of Pittsburgh, died of complications from COVID-19. But football fans kept tuning in. Teams are not generally forthcoming about infections, both out of concern for the privacy of their players, and, at least according to the University of Oklahoma football coach Lincoln Riley, because it gives them a competitive advantage. Only rarely did stories of players struggling with the illness, or even being hospitalized, appear in the press. COVID cases and mandatory quarantines were described by coaches and analysts as an annoyance or a misfortune roughly on par with a sprained ankle. Television contracts were being honored. Money flowed to schools and to coaches, if not to players. The playoffs were on the horizon. Fans went to bars. Families and friends gathered for game day. The lower stands of stadiums at many schools were filled with people. You could turn on the television every weekend and see some semblance of normalcy.
The introduction of daily rapid testing had seemed like a real advance—and it was loudly touted by the Big Ten. The argument was that widespread, frequent use of tests with quick turnaround times could allow for a return to more or less normal activity, even if those tests were not as accurate as those that take longer to produce results. The tests wouldn’t stop people from catching the virus, but, theoretically, they could identify infected people before they’d interacted much with others. (The Pac-12 is also using daily rapid testing. Players in other Power Five conferences are tested less often, typically using the more accurate P.C.R. tests, while teams in less prestigious conferences have differing—and sometimes less stringent—testing regimes.) The results of the approach would potentially have ramifications far beyond football. “This is one of the first really high-quality, real-world tests of that concept,” Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin, told me.
It didn’t quite work. For the first month, testing went smoothly, but Wisconsin’s outbreak occurred anyway—and other programs conducting daily antigen testing had outbreaks, too. At the University of Maryland, twenty-three players tested positive in a two-week span; several Pac-12 teams had to cancel games because they did not have the minimum number of scholarship players available.
When I spoke to O’Connor, in early November, his lab—in collaboration with county and state public-health officials and the C.D.C.—was trying to figure out how the disease had spread within the Badgers football program. The lab was looking for genetic signatures in the team’s positive samples, and was using what O’Connor’s colleague, Thomas Friedrich, called shoe-leather epidemiology to find clues about where the virus had originated. Had there been lapses in social-distancing protocols? Would a more sensitive test have made a difference? Could the outbreak be traced to one source, or was there more than one simultaneous infection? Did the efficacy of daily rapid testing depend on lower rates of community transmission?
O’Connor told me that he’d been partial to the view that, with “really fast turnaround testing, even with lower sensitivity tests, you could enable a safer reopening of schools, a safer reopening of the economy.” And yet, he said, “You can still have an outbreak.” The rash of positive tests on the football team had reminded O’Connor and Friedrich of the need both for data and for humility. When I asked them, over Zoom, if the investigation had changed their views on whether it was advisable to play football this year, Friedrich gave me a wry smile. “My personal view is that it wasn’t advisable in the first place,” he said.
“I started a little more optimistic than Tom on the ability of testing to make it safe,” O’Connor said. “I didn’t think it was advisable, but for another reason. We are in a state where there’s an entire culture around football.” Friedrich chimed in to agree. That culture is intensely social. The bigger problem, as they saw it, wasn’t whether the protocols could protect the players. It was that those protocols wouldn’t protect the rest of us.
This past summer, a group of researchers at Washington State University started thinking about what a football season might mean for the city of Pullman, where the university is based. At that point, Washington State, which plays in the Pac-12, planned to begin its season in September; the question was whether fans would be allowed to attend the games. The perils were obvious: every public-health expert was advising against large gatherings. But what was the precise level of risk? Washington State’s athletic department was running an operating deficit of nearly a hundred million dollars, and around half of its usual revenue came from football, including ticket sales—but the considerations weren’t only financial. Although Washington State has one of the smallest stadiums in big-time college football, its fan base is passionate. Game days are big days in Pullman.
The researchers used mathematical modelling to simulate how visitors coming to a campus community very much like Washington State’s to attend a football game would affect the levels of the virus in the community. The scope of their inquiry was relatively narrow: they did not have anything to say, for instance, about whether a visitor might become infected and bring the virus back to her own community—a risk that “could lead to multiple outbreaks around the country,” as Jill Weatherhead, a professor of infectious diseases at the Baylor College of Medicine, told me. The Washington State paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but what the researchers found was sobering. In simulations in which a small number of visitors with COVID-19 mixed lightly with a campus community experiencing an uncontrolled outbreak, cases rose in the community by twenty-five per cent. When visitors with a high prevalence of the coronavirus mixed heavily with a campus community where the virus was previously under control, the local increase was more than eight hundred per cent.
The Pac-12 and the Big Ten ultimately decided not to let fans—with the exception of players’ families—into stadiums at all. But the rest of the Power Five, along with several smaller conferences, did. On those campuses, and in those college towns, we don’t yet know whether things played out the way the researchers’ model projected—for one thing, most of the schools are admitting fewer fans than the model estimated. And we may never precisely learn the results of these gambles. Two weeks before the S.E.C. football season began, Oxford, Mississippi, where Ole Miss is situated, had the highest daily infection rate—eighty-five per one hundred thousand people—of any college town whose school was playing football. (Health officials generally recommend the suspension of nonessential activities at anything above twenty-five.) When the team kicked off the season, nearly fifteen thousand fans were in the stands; more than two and a half million people watched on television, many of them doubtless gathering to watch at bars or inside homes. Katie Taylor, an epidemiologist with Mississippi’s department of health, told me, in an e-mail, that the department had not “at this time directly tied cases to outbreaks or clusters associated with football-related activities.” She added, “However, we know that many of these settings, especially gatherings for football watching, can lead to transmission.” The University of Alabama saw a massive surge in cases when students returned to campus. The number of cases had dropped by the time the football season began, and it has not risen precipitously since. But cases in Alabama as a whole have been rising steadily all fall. Karen Landers, an officer in Alabama’s public-health department, told me, “Attendance at sporting events and also attendance at parties relating to sporting events has contributed to outbreaks.” Department policy prevented her from providing specifics, she said.
The Texas Department of State Health Services maintains a database of investigations conducted by local health departments. The database is not comprehensive, but, for what it’s worth, earlier this month, it included only eighteen cases indicating in-person college-football attendance. Eric Lofgren, one of the Washington State researchers, told me that, as far as predicting outbreaks goes, “I would really like to be wrong.” It’s possible that students and visitors don’t mix in the way the researchers’ model assumes. It’s also possible, Lofgren noted, that people going to games are taking the virus more seriously than they sometimes get credit for. It may help that people at football games are captive audiences for public-health messages about mask-wearing and other precautions. The games are played in large, outdoor stadiums where fans have been required to wear masks: these factors, too, may have reduced the risk of widespread transmission. And with such uncontrolled community transmission across the country, it’s hard to say where infections are occuring.
Some football programs are using in-person attendance as an opportunity to identify positive cases. The University of Texas at Austin requires proof of a negative test in order for students to pick up their tickets; of the twelve hundred students tested before the first game of the season, ninety-six tested positive, and the seventy-five who had not previously had the virus were then isolated. “It was an incentive for folks to come and get tested, which is great,” Amy Young, the vice-dean of professional practice at the university’s medical school and the chief clinical officer for UT Health Austin, said.
And yet, viewed another way, that data simply illustrates what a risky experiment schools are undertaking. At most of these schools, no test is required before a fan may enter the stadium—and even at the University of Texas, only twelve hundred out of the fifteen thousand people who attended were tested. That nearly a hundred people tested positive out of this small sample suggests that, across the state, thousands of people infected with the coronavirus are going to games, where they shout, use bathrooms, and grab beers from concession stands. The city of Lubbock, where Texas Tech is situated, has permitted some tailgating. A month into the season, Lubbock had one of the highest coronavirus-infection rates in the country.
Darlene Bhavnani, the head of the University of Texas’s contact-tracing program, told me, “Looking at the data we’ve collected, there doesn’t seem to be transmission at the game, at the stadium.” But contact tracing is an imperfect art, and, as a general rule, it is more focussed on preventing further spread than on determining the specific activity that led to an infection. The point is “primarily to establish an infectious period and then to identify contacts,” Sam Jarvis, a Community Health Manager at Johnson County Public Health, in Iowa, wrote in an e-mail.
What’s more, as Lofgren pointed out to me, “The majority of people’s engagement with sports is not actually in the stands.” The Washington State study includes transmission from any event surrounding a game, such as an out-of-town visitor catching the virus while going out to dinner near campus the night before. “Does the contact tracer identify that as because of football?” Lofgren asked. “I don’t know. I think there’s ambiguity.” In places like Iowa City, where the University of Iowa is situated, they probably wouldn’t, Jarvis told me. “We don’t have the capacity to pinpoint single events like that,” he said. “It’s frustrating, for sure, because we know it’s happening, but it’s difficult to pinpoint like that with all the noise.” Tracing has only become harder as the pandemic has entered its third wave. “With overwhelming spread, public-health resources are going to have a much harder time tracing back where infection happened,” Jill Weatherhead told me.
And there may be another reason that no college football game has been confirmed as a superspreader event: luck. The Washington State model is stochastic—it involves randomness. “There are many examples in the data where you don’t have anything bad happen,” Lofgren explained. That doesn’t mean that holding mass gatherings is a good idea, just that it’s possible schools have taken chances but have not been burned—yet. In that case, the more transmission there is within communities, and the more games that are played, the more likely our luck, such as it may be, will end.
During a normal year, in the lead-up to a Michigan State home game, Aaron Stephens, the mayor of East Lansing, would be worrying about traffic. This year, he was focussed on a public-messaging blitz: don’t go to the stadium; don’t tailgate in the parking lot; do wear a mask. Indoor gatherings in East Lansing were capped at ten people, and outdoor gatherings were limited to twenty-five. Violators could face fines of up to five hundred dollars, but Stephens tried to emphasize the carrot rather than the stick: “If we want to have football, we have to adhere to these rules.”
Stephens, who became the mayor this summer, is twenty-four years old, and a recent graduate of Michigan State. “I understand the reality of being in college,” he said. He was at game-day parties himself not so long ago. This year, during the season-opener, people crammed inside apartments off campus, with the game on television in the background and the kegs tapped. “I saw a couple of parties that were probably above a hundred people,” Stephens told me later that week. There was only so much the city could do. “By the time we get there and break up the event, the spread has already happened,” he noted. We spoke the day before Halloween, when Michigan State was set to play its rival, the University of Michigan. Stephens was dreading it, expecting mayhem if the Spartans won. “In a weird way, it got me rooting against my own team,” he said. Michigan State beat Michigan, 27–24, and fans flooded the streets. Some wore masks. Many did not. They headed toward the apartment complexes in Cedar Village, where they partook in a time-honored tradition of setting couches on fire.
I asked Linda Vail, the head of the health department for Ingham County, which includes East Lansing, if there was evidence that the game had contributed to the spread of the virus in the area. She told me that, in the two weeks after the game, there was a significant increase in cases. “That said, we’re seeing a significant increase across our community, too,” she said. “So, yes. But who knows.”
The cities where Big Ten universities are situated form a kind of consortium. In early October, Stephens’s office started contacting the other mayors, and a Zoom call was arranged. Stephens proposed writing a letter to the Big Ten executives, requesting that, when they decided whether or not to hold games, they take into account the prevalence of the virus not only among players and coaches but within the local community. The mayors had other suggestions, too, such as scheduling games earlier in the day—night games are often preceded by hours of drinking, which can lead to more reckless behavior. The final version of the letter was signed by eleven of the fourteen Big Ten mayors. It was carefully worded—almost painfully so. The mayors “humbly” requested that the Big Ten determine “defined metrics for overall community population positivity rates and test positivity” when deciding whether to play. Every mayor I spoke to emphasized the strong relationship that he or she had with the local university. Some said that they were glad to have football back. All of them were in an impossible position.
Football helped put East Lansing, a city with a population under fifty thousand, on the map. Ohio State has a phenomenal veterinary program, but that is not what brings most visitors to Columbus. The economic impact that football has on these local economies is tremendous, and so is its effect on the morale of many people who live there. The mayors understand this. Still, they had watched the virus spread on campuses, and they knew that the social buffer between students and locals, which had helped contain the virus during earlier outbreaks, was likely to break down when football arrived. Several of them described what took place after games like scenes out of a COVID-19 nightmare: students pouring into downtown, spewing the virus with drunken screams.
Such behavior isn’t wise, but it is predictable. Fans, especially young fans, play their roles as well as any defensive line. It is possible that the enduring image of the 2020 season will be the strange and stupid sight of hundreds of Notre Dame students flooding the field after their team upset No. 1 Clemson. (It was a somewhat fluky result: Clemson’s star quarterback, Trevor Lawrence, missed the game because he had contracted the coronavirus.) Afterward, the university’s president, who had contracted the virus after attending a gathering at the White House for Justice Amy Coney Barrett without wearing a mask, admonished the students, in a letter, for their poor decision-making. The letter did not offer any reflection on the institutional decisions that had led to the students being in the stadium in the first place.
After the mayors sent their letter, Jim Borchers, Ohio State’s team physician and the chair of the Big Ten’s return-to-play medical subcommittee, told the Wall Street Journal that the university did monitor “other metrics from the university, local communities and states where the teams are participating.” He added, “I don’t know that the student athletes should be punished for the inability of the general public to get their minds around how to prevent this.” Many of the arguments in favor of having college-football games come down to the idea that players deserve to chase their dreams. Football always involves some risk, and every decision we make during a pandemic involves trade-offs and risk assessments. But those who criticize the schools can make a similar argument. College athletes are not more deserving of their dreams than those who have postponed weddings, or attempted remote learning for their kids, or held virtual funerals rather than gathering in person.
“Every step we take back toward normality has a risk and a benefit associated with it,” Zach Binney, a professor at Emory with a degree in epidemiology, told me. “Establish the level of risk that you’re O.K. with. And that’s going to vary based on the benefits. This is not some crazy theory. We never closed grocery stores. Why not? Because the benefit of having them open was too high.” Other activities, though, lead inevitably to arguments. How much risk is acceptable when marching for social justice? Or celebrating a political victory? With college football, the calculation is even more complicated, because much of the risk is connected with associated behaviors—those watch parties, for instance—that don’t have to happen but should probably be expected. The sport provides a welcome, and some would even say necessary, distraction, at a moment social ties are under strain. But at what cost? “If you have to ask the question, should people be able to party during Badgers games or have first graders in school, you should choose first graders in school,” O’Connor, the University of Wisconsin epidemiologist, said.
Part of the issue, perhaps, is that the focus on the safety of players and on fans in stadiums has obscured the risks of game-day rituals and the ripple effects whenever infections spread. “All those other activities,” O’Connor said, “conspire to make it more difficult to bring the virus under control.”
If there is a single underlying fallacy that has led to the persistence of college football during the worst pandemic the country has seen in a century, it is the idea that football is a discrete activity that can be considered separately from all the other things that we do. College athletes are young and generally healthy; even if they contract the coronavirus, they are unlikely to face its severest consequences. When the Wisconsin Badgers resumed the season after a few weeks of cancellations, Graham Mertz was back on the field and threw two touchdowns. (He threw three interceptions in a loss a week later.) For the most part, the students who were cheering him on at home or at watch parties probably do not belong to the most vulnerable population when it comes to the virus, either. But many other college football fans are older. Some have underlying health conditions. And those with asymptomatic cases can and do spread the virus to others. The people they spread it to can then spread it further.
The real danger that college football poses during the pandemic may not be in the mass gatherings and dramatic outpourings of enthusiasm but in the ordinary and suddenly unsafe behaviors of small groups of people trying to find, in football, the refuge of their remembered lives. Millions watch the games every weekend, and many are watching in groups that include people from outside their household. Public-health officials have made numerous statements warning of the dangers of viral spread when people gather to watch football, but it’s hard to get such messages across when events are being held as if little has changed. Kathleen Bachynski, a professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, asked me, rhetorically, “If football is proceeding, what does that signal to people about where we’re at with our pandemic response?”
Football, particularly college football, is an occasion, a communal event. The ecosystem around the sport is vast. It starts with the players, but it extends to their classmates and to their coaches. It branches out to athletic trainers and their partners and kids. It extends to journalists, and camera operators, and photographers, and stadium workers, and bus drivers, and their families. It includes alumni scattered all over the world, and their children, and other children in other places who root for the teams with the uniforms they like. It brings together grandfathers and granddaughters, and aunts and cousins, and their spouses, and their friends. This is the majesty of college football: it connects people in a great web of affection. These are the filaments along which the virus can spread.
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