Sports and The Pandemic

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I thought this might be a good time to move general sports discussion about how the pandemic has changed how we proceed and what we expect to it’s own thread.

We have discussions that encompass this in several threads, but this isn’t so much to end those, as each sport has its own set of challenges. But often, the topic becomes general, and we begin mixing sports in ways that aren’t useful. At the very least, for those of us that look at threads for multiple sports, it can sometimes make it hard to not go off topic, and an off topic that is already destined for Cleveland.

But sports do play a role in our society‘s response. We can credit the NBA with waking us up and making social distancing a thing we actually embraced. And sports returning is going to be a sign of a return to normalcy.

But there are competing stakeholders between players, owners, the media, and the fans. And this is about money and industry first, so each stakeholder is cutthroat. How sports resolves this will in all likelihood be how the nation resolves this.

I don't see how the North American leagues can return, playing in the United States, while the first wave still rages out of control there. The Premier League starting up again this week in the UK seemed a tad early and the situation isn't as bad there.

Roke wrote:

I don't see how the North American leagues can return, playing in the United States, while the first wave still rages out of control there.

Very easily, we decide that several thousand Americans dying each week is an acceptable price to pay for "freedom." And $$$.

Prederick wrote:
Roke wrote:

I don't see how the North American leagues can return, playing in the United States, while the first wave still rages out of control there.

Very easily, $$$.

FTFY

At least 10 NFL teams have reported at least one positive COVID test

Sports don't happen this year. Leagues will try, but it won't happen; I could imagine baseball due to it being in lots of ways a solo sport played with other people, but, for sports like football or basketball with a high level of physical contact, there's no way to keep COVID from running rampant. Believing there will be sports is just wishful thinking that's going to get people killed.

garion333 wrote:
Prederick wrote:
Roke wrote:

I don't see how the North American leagues can return, playing in the United States, while the first wave still rages out of control there.

Very easily, $$$.

FTFY

If it were just fans that would get sick, I think you'd be right. But the players themselves are susceptible, too. They're already getting sick, and not enough of them would tolerate the prolonged isolation required to keep them from being exposed outside the arena. They can't wear masks all the time; it's impossible to socially distance in a locker room, much less on a playing field, on the sidelines, or in a dugout. Audiences and owners might be willing to accept risk and loss, but I expect player unions to balk.

I look forward to ESPN commissioning 80 new 30 for 30s until a vaccine is available.

I don’t think contact in practice and games is the real problem. We are asking 20-30 wealthy athletes that have been coddled since they were in little leagues to sit in a bubble away from family and friends.

Then we are asking ultra superstars, who have all the money their families will ever need to quarantine e away from this families with entitled 20-30 year olds they may trust on the field, but with their lives?

If our country was looking at 2-4 thousand cases a day instead of 25-30 thousand, you could make empty stadiums and arenas work. But with this much spread, you cannot keep athletes and students safe.

Man when a vaccine drops, it'll be the the biggest needle poke-fest in sports since BALCO.

*Legion* wrote:

Man when a vaccine drops, it'll be the the biggest needle poke-fest in sports since BALCO.

Oh God, it's going to be the Calgary Flames' vaccine snatching all over again.

With all these athletes testing positive while still working out and practicing, it makes me wonder just how many people are walking around asymptomatic. If we could get have some kind of universal testing, even in just one county, I wonder what it would show us.

There is no way that the NFL gets cancelled. Trump would get Barr to arrest Goodell and the owners and send them to Gitmo before that happened.

You know there are college football coaches out there glad that their players are getting Covid now instead of during August practices or when the season starts. Because college football coaches are sociopaths, and anything besides Xs and Os is a distraction. Including a pandemic.

Jokes on them! There won't be any college football this fall. Schools will be lucky to have baseball and lacrosse in the spring. This country's response to Covid is somewhere between Columbia U football of the 1980s and Prairie View A&M football of the 1990s.

Sorry, in other words. Just sorry.

One of the guys on my team has a friend who is 28 plays in a semi-pro soccer league and got Covid.. took him 10 weeks to test negative. He had off an on bad weeks during that and 2 times went to the hospital. The bottom line is that just because you are young and in relatively good shape doesnt mean its an automatic get out of jail free card with this.

In the meantime he wasnt anywhere near his wife and kids for 10 weeks.. I just can't see how we play organized sports on any level until there is a vaccine or at least a sure fire treatment.

Missouri’s two peaks of new cases over a 7 day average was 256 on 4/12 and 254 on 5/7. After that second peak, the lockdown began to drop cases, and we got down to 135 by 5/17. At this point I feel like maybe we have a shot, but people are getting complacent.

This weekend we have over 800 cases, and 1100 going back to Friday. Our 7-day average is now 313 after yesterday was 254. So we are right back in the sh*t.

So what does the local paper run?

St. Louis County: Some outdoor youth high-contact sports can resume next week

Eric Eickmeyer, president of the Kirkwood Athletic Association, attended Page’s news conference. Eickmeyer said, “We won’t have players high-fiving each other.” He said they will be focused on keeping bats and balls sterilized “as best we can.”

Good idea, Jayhawker. Thanks for starting the thread!

I think that this is going to vary by sport, and money will be a key driver (in several ways).

In Germany and the UK top-level soccer has restarted, underpinned by regular testing for participants and - I believe - an understanding that a positive test means the removal of an individual for quarantine, not an entire team.

I think this works well for soccer, because the nature of the game means that the impact of removing a single player isn't overwhelming. I suspect that once you start throwing a ball rather than kicking it, this equation changes. We've seen what happens to most teams when they lose a starting QB, for example.

But the sport I'm most concerned for is rugby union. Viewed from an epidemiological perspective, the rugby scrum is a nightmare. !6 players, bound together using their arms, exerting themselves furiously 10 times a game.

New Zealand, which has basically beaten the epidemic, is allowing rugby to go ahead without restrictions. But I simply don't see how it can be allowed to go ahead in the UK, even at professional level. And if that's the case, then I definitely can't see the amateur game returning before a vaccine.

Views?

I wouldn't be surprised if the NHL can finish the season but I'd be more enthusiastic and optimistic if they were just focused on starting next season instead. NHL has the option of using BC. We're down to multiple weeks of single confirmed cases and no community outbreaks. We have, at least, 7 NHL-size hockey rinks that are fully equipped for broadcast. Once everyone on a team, including staff, are shown to be clear there isn't a risk from anyone bringing it in from outside.

NHL doesn't seem to want to go that route and are adamant that the mandatory two-week quarantine be waived. They really are enamored with single venue and two locations when they should have been working on the logistics of finishing in BC. Done properly, they could have been the only NA major sport on TV for a while.

Not a big-four sport, but another indication MLS & the NBA attempting to hold sports in Florida was a bad decision:

Breaking NWSL news: The Orlando Pride have several positive COVID-19 cases and will not travel to Utah for the Challenge Cup. Updates to follow.
Vector wrote:

NHL doesn't seem to want to go that route and are adamant that the mandatory two-week quarantine be waived. They really are enamored with single venue and two locations when they should have been working on the logistics of finishing in BC. Done properly, they could have been the only NA major sport on TV for a while.

I'd be a lot more comfortable if the federal and provincial governments hadn't provided some exemptions to a full 14-day quarantine for the NHL. The last thing we need is meathead hockey players coming North of the border and being a new vector for the disease. Federal officials in particular have handled this pandemic abysmally.

Orlando Pride withdrawing from the Challenge Cup is apparently because there were a number of younger players who stopped following distancing protocols, and were going to bars (which have been allowed to re-open in Florida).

While Alex Morgan was already out of the tournament after giving birth last month, the Pride's withdrawal means that Brazil legend Marta will be absent – as will World Cup winners Sydney Leroux, Ali Krieger, Ashlyn Harris and Emily Sonnett, as well as England international Jade Moore and 90min World Cup columnist Ali Riley.

The veterans are going to wreck the kids who went bar-hopping during a pandemic.

Two-footed challenges all day, every day, until you quit.

How do you socially distance while playing football? Well, you don’t. But that’s not as much of an issue if you have the resources to test regularly, such as on game days and at least once during the week, according to Dr. Travis Glenn, a professor who specializes in environmental health science.

“They’re going to be able to put into practice things that are going to be able to keep their players mostly safe,” Glenn said.

Dr. Glenn goes on to state the obvious — the less resources a program has, the harder it will be to meet that standard. Did I mention that two of Georgia’s first four games are against ETSU and UL Monroe?

The above from a UGA blog I follow, that is referencing an Athletic article.

Big time college football programs are already struggling with the enormity of this all, even at places like Georgia

So, how in the hell are East Tennessee State and Louisiana Monroe going to manage this?

What happens if UGA with more resources than most schools actually manages to navigate the summer without make outbreaks or setbacks only to lose half the team to quarantine because of playing one of those smaller schools?

Roke wrote:
Vector wrote:

NHL doesn't seem to want to go that route and are adamant that the mandatory two-week quarantine be waived. They really are enamored with single venue and two locations when they should have been working on the logistics of finishing in BC. Done properly, they could have been the only NA major sport on TV for a while.

I'd be a lot more comfortable if the federal and provincial governments hadn't provided some exemptions to a full 14-day quarantine for the NHL. The last thing we need is meathead hockey players coming North of the border and being a new vector for the disease. Federal officials in particular have handled this pandemic abysmally.

Our BC officials have been very good, however. For me to be comfortable with whatever they're planning, the NHL will have to release the details about what regulations teams will be under. If it's restrictive and officials and NHL are actually taking precautions, it should be safe. My concern is more on the NHL officials and team staff than the players. The guys enforcing the rules have a long history of bending them.

Badferret wrote:
How do you socially distance while playing football? Well, you don’t. But that’s not as much of an issue if you have the resources to test regularly, such as on game days and at least once during the week, according to Dr. Travis Glenn, a professor who specializes in environmental health science.

“They’re going to be able to put into practice things that are going to be able to keep their players mostly safe,” Glenn said.

Dr. Glenn goes on to state the obvious — the less resources a program has, the harder it will be to meet that standard. Did I mention that two of Georgia’s first four games are against ETSU and UL Monroe?

The above from a UGA blog I follow, that is referencing an Athletic article.

Big time college football programs are already struggling with the enormity of this all, even at places like Georgia

So, how in the hell are East Tennessee State and Louisiana Monroe going to manage this?

What happens if UGA with more resources than most schools actually manages to navigate the summer without make outbreaks or setbacks only to lose half the team to quarantine because of playing one of those smaller schools?

Well, think about how careful professional sports teams are being about this; they're industries that make billions of dollars a year, and it's hard to find a better motivation to keep COVID away than that. MLB is shutting down training camps, and that's by far the major sport with the least physical contact. The Tampa Bay Lightning shut down their practices, at least a dozen NFL teams have reported issues, and it's popping up on college campuses.

If there are billions of dollars on the line and those leagues still can't prevent COVID spread, then college teams aren't going to vaguely have the resources to control this.

Vector wrote:

Our BC officials have been very good, however. For me to be comfortable with whatever they're planning, the NHL will have to release the details about what regulations teams will be under. If it's restrictive and officials and NHL are actually taking precautions, it should be safe. My concern is more on the NHL officials and team staff than the players. The guys enforcing the rules have a long history of bending them.

BC's done a great job, especially Dr. Henry as a communicator. I expected things to be a lot worse given Vancouver's airport is a bit of an international hub.

Unfortunately, at least in Alberta, the goalposts have shifted:

A month ago, we were talking about a strict number of personnel per team, quarantined teams being "effectively sealed off from the rest of the community," and now we're talking about players bringing families and taking tours of the Rockies? Seems like the posts weren't pegged.

I don't think that's acceptable.

Yup. That's my problem as well. If the whole plan was constricted to purely BC (5 WHL arenas are NHL sized with full camera equipment and are spread out throughout the major cities of BC and the two Vancouver NHL rinks are also available) with strict rules that only loosen as teams are eliminated, then I'd be comfortable. This would even speed up the process by allowing them to play multiple games at the same time. That they are going to host in two locations seems crazy to me. Even more irresponsible to split between the USA and Canada. I get the appeal of a potential bubble in Vegas but does anyone have any real confidence in America's commitment to safety?

Vector wrote:

I get the appeal of a potential bubble in Vegas but does anyone have any real confidence in America's commitment to safety?

I'm going to suggest that Vegas is quite possibly the worst possible place to try to set up a bubble for this; basically, if you're traveling Vegas, there's a decent chance you are not particularly good at calculating probability and risk, and maybe, just maybe, those are kind of important factors these days.

Yeah hockey could have had the spotlight. Send teams to BC, quarantined. Just like the NBA plan for Orlando, except not in a hot spot. Hockey might have been playing already and picked up some fans. But they're blowing it.

I watched two soccer matches this weekend because OMG live sports. I haven't watched a non tournament, non international qualifying, pro soccer match in ages, if ever.

I will be interested to see what happens in basketball or hockey when at player tests positive. And I will be very interested to see how quickly it spreads among NFL teams. If the NFL holds games, I could see teams losing so many players that they have to forfeit.

No one is taking this seriously enough.

UpToIsomorphism wrote:

I will be interested to see what happens in basketball or hockey when at player tests positive. And I will be very interested to see how quickly it spreads among NFL teams. If the NFL holds games, I could see teams losing so many players that they have to forfeit.

No one is taking this seriously enough.

One of the guidelines for clubs in the Bundesliga's restart plan was "Make sure early on that the roster is large enough to complete the season."

In the Russian league FC Rostov had to play youth players because they didn't isolate at all, six players got infected, and they had to isolate their entire first-team.

Paleocon wrote:

There is no way that the NFL gets cancelled. Trump would get Barr to arrest Goodell and the owners and send them to Gitmo before that happened.

Book it.

Goodell has already started testing the boundaries of ignoring Trump. By fall, Trump will be even more isolated (figuratively) and I'll bet his previous allies start to desert him as he starts to look more like a lame duck.

For all the money involved, players may not want to risk a hospital stay and their future earnings, particularly when other leagues are idle too. Sit until there is a vaccine.

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