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How can suddenly risk-averse colleges ever play football
Posted on: August 20, 2020 at 07:38:25 CT
ummmm MU
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again?
By Mark Zeigler:
Remember CTE?
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy?
It is the progressive neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions and other forms of repetitive head trauma, marked by an abnormal accumulation of tau proteins in parts of the brain that leads to cognitive dysfunction, personality changes, behavioral disorder, dementia and, ultimately, death. A 2017 analysis of brain tissues found evidence of CTE in 110 of 111 deceased NFL players and 48 of 53 former college football players.
Research is ongoing, and progress has been made on a diagnostic test for the living. Meanwhile, the NFL is paying out a $1 billion settlement to its retired players (that its major insurer initially refused to cover). And hundreds of civil lawsuits have been filed against the NCAA or member institutions, including one last month by the family of Jason Franklin, a linebacker at Arizona State from 2011 to 2016 who committed suicide in 2018.
This isn’t what shut down college football in the Pac-12, Big Ten, Mountain West and several other NCAA Division I conferences, and possibly several more as their September openers grow closer.
This did: a virus that, among college-aged athletes, is largely asymptomatic and has a fatality rate lower than the seasonal flu.
When the NCAA basketball tournament and spring sports were canceled in March, the reasoning was COVID-19 is a highly contagious virus that could overburden hospitals and quickly spread to grandparents. Flatten the curve, we heard from athletic officials.
Then the narrative changed to not playing college sports if students weren’t on campus, forgetting that at some universities a month or more of the football and basketball seasons are regularly contested during summer or winter breaks.
Now it has changed again. Now it is about the health of individual athletes. Now it is about myocarditis and other potential long-term complications associated with COVID-19, about civil liability, about risk aversion, about the unknown.
Asked why, five days after releasing a schedule, the Mountain West scrapped fall football, Commissioner Craig Thompson told SiriusXM radio: “One of our board members said: ‘I could not live with myself if a young man, God forbid, died on our watch.’ … That’s the answer to your question.”
Which is all perfectly understandable, reasonable, justifiable and virtuous.
Which also might have backed college sports, specifically football, into the shadow of its own goal line without a playbook to get out.
“There is no exit strategy,” one athletic director told me.
“We’ve tangled ourselves in so many webs that I don’t know how we’ll ever get out,” another said.
Shut down to flatten the curve? No problem. You return when case metrics subside.
Shut down because students aren’t on campus? No problem. You return to the field when students return to classes.
Shut down amid fears of long-term medical complications? Problem.
Let’s start with myocarditis, which is a new, spooky word in the vocabularies of university presidents but actually has been a known entity for decades. It is an inflammation of the heart muscle that, if untreated, can lead to cardiac damage and potentially death but is easily diagnosed and typically dissipates with a few months’ rest.
What causes myocarditis? Many viruses, including the common cold. Also, herpes, hepatitis, strep throat, staph bacteria, HIV, Epstein-Barr syndrome and many sexually transmitted diseases. Also, fungal and parasitic infections. Also, alcohol, drugs, lead, spider bites, wasp stings and snakebites.
But the presentations about the prospect of athletes infected with COVID-19 also having myocarditis was enough, according to several reports, to scare Pac-12 and Big Ten presidents into immediately cancelling fall sports, even though their team doctors and athletic trainers regularly screen for it. A key element was a German study that found abnormal cardiac readings in 78 of 100 recovered COVID-19 patients.
The Pac-12’s Medical Advisory Committee, explaining its recommendation not to proceed with contact or competition, outlined “concerns about health outcomes related to the virus … (including) new and evolving information regarding potential serious cardiac side effects in elite athletes.” A source told CBSSports.com that “myocarditis is the ballgame” with the Pac-12 and Big Ten.
The other three power conferences — ACC, SEC and Big 12 — are pushing forward with plans to play, however. One reason: Dr. Michael Ackerman.
He is a genetic cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota whose expertise is sudden cardiac death. He advised the Big 12 and others that, while there might be other reasons to shut down the football season, myocarditis shouldn’t be one. He also called the German study “apples and watermelons” and “a complete inappropriate paper” and “a big FOUL” as it applies to college athletes because the median age of its subjects was 50. Others have questioned its statistical conclusions.
“We thought we needed to clear the air and restore some semblance of balance to the universe, and that’s why I threw down the penalty flag,” Ackerman, who doesn’t consider himself a college football fan, told TexAgs.com. “(Myocarditis) is not new news. The thing that started to happen is the anecdotes started to emerge. That then gets in front of true evidence. And the anecdotes become powerful pictures, and everyone starts saying, ‘We’re playing with fire.’ But we have myocarditis a lot.”
Hundreds of parents of Big Ten players agree and have sent letters to their university presidents urging them to reconsider. To prove how unconcerned they are about COVID-19 health risks, they offered to sign liability waivers.
Except they can’t.
In June, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed legislation that prohibits COVID-19 liability waivers for college athletes. Speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, NCAA President Mark Emmert concurred, calling it “an inappropriate thing for schools to be doing.” In August, the NCAA banned them.
And the web tangles college sports even more.
Students can’t sign liability waivers acknowledging the hazards of their sport at a time when conferences have brought their risk aversion to historic highs. “It became abundantly clear,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said in a statement announcing the Aug. 11 decision to cancel fall sports, “that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”
Or, maybe, ever?
COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon. Virus vaccines often aren’t foolproof (even Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’d “settle” for 70 percent efficacy), and healthy 20-year athletes aren’t going to be first in line to get it given the needs of the elderly and more vulnerable. There’s still going to be a chance they can catch it, still a chance it might lead to myocarditis.
And if your primary fear is long-term consequences, wouldn’t that require long-term medical studies to determine? How are you going to know by January 2021 that it’s safe? Or January 2022? Or January 2025?
“We play football every year risking CTE … which ruins lives,” Oklahoma kicker Gabe Brkic tweeted on Aug. 10. “Not too scared of Covid.”
It’s a plea to continue the 2020 season and accompanied by the hashtag “WeWantToPlay.” But, unwittingly, it may signal the biggest obstacle to ever play again. If presidents are so scared of COVID-19, what about a progressive neurodegenerative disease linked to football concussions that leads to cognitive dysfunction, personality changes, behavioral disorder, dementia and, ultimately, death?
COVID-19 symptoms include fever, chills and a cough but not memory loss. It’s only a matter of time, then, before suddenly spooked college presidents remember CTE.
What then?
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sports/sports-columnists/story/2020-08-19/zeigler-college-football-covid-cte-myocarditis-pac-12-big-ten-conference-michael-ackerman-fall-sports
By Mark Zeigler:
Remember CTE?
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy?
It is the progressive neurodegenerative disease linked to concussions and other forms of repetitive head trauma, marked by an abnormal accumulation of tau proteins in parts of the brain that leads to cognitive dysfunction, personality changes, behavioral disorder, dementia and, ultimately, death. A 2017 analysis of brain tissues found evidence of CTE in 110 of 111 deceased NFL players and 48 of 53 former college football players.
Research is ongoing, and progress has been made on a diagnostic test for the living. Meanwhile, the NFL is paying out a $1 billion settlement to its retired players (that its major insurer initially refused to cover). And hundreds of civil lawsuits have been filed against the NCAA or member institutions, including one last month by the family of Jason Franklin, a linebacker at Arizona State from 2011 to 2016 who committed suicide in 2018.
This isn’t what shut down college football in the Pac-12, Big Ten, Mountain West and several other NCAA Division I conferences, and possibly several more as their September openers grow closer.
This did: a virus that, among college-aged athletes, is largely asymptomatic and has a fatality rate lower than the seasonal flu.
When the NCAA basketball tournament and spring sports were canceled in March, the reasoning was COVID-19 is a highly contagious virus that could overburden hospitals and quickly spread to grandparents. Flatten the curve, we heard from athletic officials.
Then the narrative changed to not playing college sports if students weren’t on campus, forgetting that at some universities a month or more of the football and basketball seasons are regularly contested during summer or winter breaks.
Now it has changed again. Now it is about the health of individual athletes. Now it is about myocarditis and other potential long-term complications associated with COVID-19, about civil liability, about risk aversion, about the unknown.
Asked why, five days after releasing a schedule, the Mountain West scrapped fall football, Commissioner Craig Thompson told SiriusXM radio: “One of our board members said: ‘I could not live with myself if a young man, God forbid, died on our watch.’ … That’s the answer to your question.”
Which is all perfectly understandable, reasonable, justifiable and virtuous.
Which also might have backed college sports, specifically football, into the shadow of its own goal line without a playbook to get out.
“There is no exit strategy,” one athletic director told me.
“We’ve tangled ourselves in so many webs that I don’t know how we’ll ever get out,” another said.
Shut down to flatten the curve? No problem. You return when case metrics subside.
Shut down because students aren’t on campus? No problem. You return to the field when students return to classes.
Shut down amid fears of long-term medical complications? Problem.
Let’s start with myocarditis, which is a new, spooky word in the vocabularies of university presidents but actually has been a known entity for decades. It is an inflammation of the heart muscle that, if untreated, can lead to cardiac damage and potentially death but is easily diagnosed and typically dissipates with a few months’ rest.
What causes myocarditis? Many viruses, including the common cold. Also, herpes, hepatitis, strep throat, staph bacteria, HIV, Epstein-Barr syndrome and many sexually transmitted diseases. Also, fungal and parasitic infections. Also, alcohol, drugs, lead, spider bites, wasp stings and snakebites.
But the presentations about the prospect of athletes infected with COVID-19 also having myocarditis was enough, according to several reports, to scare Pac-12 and Big Ten presidents into immediately cancelling fall sports, even though their team doctors and athletic trainers regularly screen for it. A key element was a German study that found abnormal cardiac readings in 78 of 100 recovered COVID-19 patients.
The Pac-12’s Medical Advisory Committee, explaining its recommendation not to proceed with contact or competition, outlined “concerns about health outcomes related to the virus … (including) new and evolving information regarding potential serious cardiac side effects in elite athletes.” A source told CBSSports.com that “myocarditis is the ballgame” with the Pac-12 and Big Ten.
The other three power conferences — ACC, SEC and Big 12 — are pushing forward with plans to play, however. One reason: Dr. Michael Ackerman.
He is a genetic cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota whose expertise is sudden cardiac death. He advised the Big 12 and others that, while there might be other reasons to shut down the football season, myocarditis shouldn’t be one. He also called the German study “apples and watermelons” and “a complete inappropriate paper” and “a big FOUL” as it applies to college athletes because the median age of its subjects was 50. Others have questioned its statistical conclusions.
“We thought we needed to clear the air and restore some semblance of balance to the universe, and that’s why I threw down the penalty flag,” Ackerman, who doesn’t consider himself a college football fan, told TexAgs.com. “(Myocarditis) is not new news. The thing that started to happen is the anecdotes started to emerge. That then gets in front of true evidence. And the anecdotes become powerful pictures, and everyone starts saying, ‘We’re playing with fire.’ But we have myocarditis a lot.”
Hundreds of parents of Big Ten players agree and have sent letters to their university presidents urging them to reconsider. To prove how unconcerned they are about COVID-19 health risks, they offered to sign liability waivers.
Except they can’t.
In June, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed legislation that prohibits COVID-19 liability waivers for college athletes. Speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, NCAA President Mark Emmert concurred, calling it “an inappropriate thing for schools to be doing.” In August, the NCAA banned them.
And the web tangles college sports even more.
Students can’t sign liability waivers acknowledging the hazards of their sport at a time when conferences have brought their risk aversion to historic highs. “It became abundantly clear,” Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said in a statement announcing the Aug. 11 decision to cancel fall sports, “that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”
Or, maybe, ever?
COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon. Virus vaccines often aren’t foolproof (even Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’d “settle” for 70 percent efficacy), and healthy 20-year athletes aren’t going to be first in line to get it given the needs of the elderly and more vulnerable. There’s still going to be a chance they can catch it, still a chance it might lead to myocarditis.
And if your primary fear is long-term consequences, wouldn’t that require long-term medical studies to determine? How are you going to know by January 2021 that it’s safe? Or January 2022? Or January 2025?
“We play football every year risking CTE … which ruins lives,” Oklahoma kicker Gabe Brkic tweeted on Aug. 10. “Not too scared of Covid.”
It’s a plea to continue the 2020 season and accompanied by the hashtag “WeWantToPlay.” But, unwittingly, it may signal the biggest obstacle to ever play again. If presidents are so scared of COVID-19, what about a progressive neurodegenerative disease linked to football concussions that leads to cognitive dysfunction, personality changes, behavioral disorder, dementia and, ultimately, death?
COVID-19 symptoms include fever, chills and a cough but not memory loss. It’s only a matter of time, then, before suddenly spooked college presidents remember CTE.
What then?
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sports/sports-columnists/story/2020-08-19/zeigler-college-football-covid-cte-myocarditis-pac-12-big-ten-conference-michael-ackerman-fall-sports
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How can suddenly risk-averse colleges ever play football - ummmm MU - 8/20 07:38:25
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