(04-23-2020 09:46 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 02:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  I would not bet on college football happening in 2020.

Can someone state the medical and scientific reasons why it will be safe to have football in the fall?

This is not the relevant question.

For example, many medical experts think that with the CTE issue, football is not medically safe to play at all. Ever.

But we still play it. Why? It's because the question of whether it's medically safe is only one part of the overall question of "should we play football?"

Same concept applies here. There's plenty of positives that come with playing college football. Or going to school. Or voting. Or seeing your friends. Or delivering food to the poor. Or 10,000 other things that we shouldn't ban for a whole year.


I'm not saying college football is the most important thing, or even that we should be playing football. I'm just saying that you're asking the wrong question.

There are also issues of raw authority and public relations. The ADs simply do not have the authority to make decisions about playing football. The NCAA doesn't.

The governors of the states do. And it takes "two to tango", that is, if Georgia is scheduled to play UCLA, and the Georgia governor has given the "green light" for schools to play football, but California's governor has not, then there will not be a game.

Also, there is the PR angle. If campuses are still closed to students, games will not be played. The P5 commissioners have already said as much. And that means no games in empty stadiums. And right now, open campuses seem very unlikely.

So the way the costs and benefits will be weighed will result in ... No football in 2020. But we shall see.

(04-23-2020 09:42 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:27 AM)TripleA Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 07:59 PM)Bronco14 Wrote:  I doubt it. Headlines today were 'Second Outbreak in Fall will be worse'.

Headlines were misleading. The actual quote was regular flu season combined with Covid-19, and we have been playing football during flu season forever.

Not saying we will play, I seriously doubt it, but those headlines were inaccurate. No medical authority is predicting covid-19 will be worse in the fall than it is now.

My guess is college football will be played next spring in a shortened season. Colleges aren't going to willingly give up that revenue if they can figure out a way to safely do it,a nd pushing it back gives them more time to see a drug treatment or vaccine (or herd immunity).

I think if that doesn't work, they will play without fans, or with quite limited seating. Again, in the spring, maybe.

But if we wait until we think nobody else will die, then we won't have an economy. We lose an average of 36K to the flu each year, bad years up to 80K or more, and nobody blinks.

This is worse, contagion wise and for vulnerable people, but we aren't going to save everybody.

OTOH, I don't see it going back to what it was before, as far as large sporting events, for maybe 2 years at the earliest.

Hospitals ability to handle it in the fall will be worse and lead to higher mortality rate. Thus it will be worse. Let's hope that the virus itself doesn't mutate and get worse.

I don’t see that. The big fear was hospitals would be overwhelmed—-and they would run out of beds, ventilators, and PPE. We have used the “flatten the curve” strategy to buy time to realign our industrial production to make more ventilators and PPE and surge hospital space.

Additionally, we will continue to keep many of the social distancing/extra hand washing strategies in place even after the economy is reopened. So, that will tend to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases as well as reducing regular flu. No reason to expect we will be unable to handle a second wave—nor is there any reason to expect it will overwhelm our hospital capacity.

It’s a pandemic. There should be no realistic expectation that we can avoid deaths. There should however be the expectation that should you need a hospital bed or ventilator that one will be available. I think we can now insure that will be the case. That said, will we be in a position to say all clear for bars, concerts, and large sporting events before we have a cure or vaccine? Sadly, I suspect not. Furthermore, even if you do open them—a large chunk of the public knows there is still a chance to get sick. Even if they know they likley won’t die, they may live with or have regular contact with a loved one that is in a high risk group. I think we are going to see a change in consumer behavior over the next 6-18 months.

My guess is, assuming they are allowed—-there will be vastly lower revenue for concerts, movies, bars, and sporting events if they are allowed to reopen. The consumer will simply not be returning to those crowded venues in the same numbers as before the pandemic.

(04-23-2020 10:26 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:46 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 02:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  I would not bet on college football happening in 2020.

Can someone state the medical and scientific reasons why it will be safe to have football in the fall?

This is not the relevant question.

For example, many medical experts think that with the CTE issue, football is not medically safe to play at all. Ever.

But we still play it. Why? It's because the question of whether it's medically safe is only one part of the overall question of "should we play football?"

Same concept applies here. There's plenty of positives that come with playing college football. Or going to school. Or voting. Or seeing your friends. Or delivering food to the poor. Or 10,000 other things that we shouldn't ban for a whole year.


I'm not saying college football is the most important thing, or even that we should be playing football. I'm just saying that you're asking the wrong question.

There are also issues of raw authority and public relations. The ADs simply do not have the authority to make decisions about playing football. The NCAA doesn't.

The governors of the states do. And it takes "two to tango", that is, if Georgia is scheduled to play UCLA, and the Georgia governor has given the "green light" for schools to play football, but California's governor has not, then there will not be a game.

Also, there is the PR angle. If campuses are still closed to students, games will not be played. The P5 commissioners have already said as much. And that means no games in empty stadiums. And right now, open campuses seem very unlikely.

So the way the costs and benefits will be weighed will result in ... No football in 2020. But we shall see.

Schools will have much bigger problems if they go completely online for fall semester. They will likely see a huge hit to fall-semester enrollment and tuition revenue. In a recent survey of college officials, fewer than half said they are even talking about the "possibility" of putting the fall semester entirely on line.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/educ...157756002/

Most schools will have on-campus schooling in some form. Which means that most schools will have a football season in some form or another. It doesn't take too much analysis to discover some reasonable alternatives. It's not 'full schedule as previously contracted' or 'no football at all.'

The majority of PAC 12 schools very well could decide to shut down football for 2020. The SEC, ACC and Big 12 very well could decide to play a full schedule mostly as planned - or, it could fall somewhere in between, with scheduling adjustments as needed.

Schools can play reduced conference-only schedules. If a school sees a team or two drop from their schedule because that school is not playing football in fall 2020, there will be reasonable options available.

For instance, I see that on 9/5, USC and Alabama are scheduled to play in Arlington, TX and TCU is scheduled to travel to play at Cal. On 10/10, Stanford is scheduled to host Notre Dame and Fresno State is scheduled to play at Texas A&M. If California schools are out, a fairly reasonable solution is for Alabama and TCU to play in Arlington on 9/5 and Notre Dame @ Texas A&M on 10/10. If Alabama, Texas, and Indiana governors are okay with football in 2020, I imagine Alabama, TCU, Notre Dame, and Texas A&M will figure something out rather than not play at all.

(04-22-2020 02:14 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 01:29 PM)DavidSt Wrote:  If California, New York, Conn., New Jersey, Mass, Penn, Illinois, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana and Colorado elected leaders say no sporting events at all this year? That will stop college football. We still have a long way to go to defeat this virus, but we are losing to it with Republican leadership.

I think we need to distinguish between (a) no *fans* at sporting events and (b) no sporting events at all.

I think that is the key. With the money involved in all of these sports, the likelihood of an NFL season is 99%. With all of the TV revenue the NFL generates, they really don't need fans. For college football, if they have students on campus in the fall, they will play football. No students, no football. The question in college football will be fan attendance, which at this point in time does not look very encouraging.

(04-23-2020 11:00 AM)YNot Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 10:26 AM)quo vadis Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:46 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 02:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  I would not bet on college football happening in 2020.

Can someone state the medical and scientific reasons why it will be safe to have football in the fall?

This is not the relevant question.

For example, many medical experts think that with the CTE issue, football is not medically safe to play at all. Ever.

But we still play it. Why? It's because the question of whether it's medically safe is only one part of the overall question of "should we play football?"

Same concept applies here. There's plenty of positives that come with playing college football. Or going to school. Or voting. Or seeing your friends. Or delivering food to the poor. Or 10,000 other things that we shouldn't ban for a whole year.


I'm not saying college football is the most important thing, or even that we should be playing football. I'm just saying that you're asking the wrong question.

There are also issues of raw authority and public relations. The ADs simply do not have the authority to make decisions about playing football. The NCAA doesn't.

The governors of the states do. And it takes "two to tango", that is, if Georgia is scheduled to play UCLA, and the Georgia governor has given the "green light" for schools to play football, but California's governor has not, then there will not be a game.

Also, there is the PR angle. If campuses are still closed to students, games will not be played. The P5 commissioners have already said as much. And that means no games in empty stadiums. And right now, open campuses seem very unlikely.

So the way the costs and benefits will be weighed will result in ... No football in 2020. But we shall see.

Schools will have much bigger problems if they go completely online for fall semester. They will likely see a huge hit to fall-semester enrollment and tuition revenue. In a recent survey of college officials, fewer than half said they are even talking about the "possibility" of putting the fall semester entirely on line.

Most schools will have on-campus schooling in some form.

They aren't talking about the possibility publicly because they shudder at the thought, they don't have to make a decision about that now, and since registration for the Fall semester has opened at many schools, they don't want to scare away students with any announcements about an online-only Fall.

But a month or two from now, many will be announcing that this is exactly how it will be, simply because they will not be getting the "all clear" from their governors. It is the governors, not college officials, who will call that shot.

Officially, schools are posting Fall registration schedules that show classes in face to face format, just like it ever was. But behind the scenes, faculty are being warned to prepare for online-only Fall semesters.

Note that the post subject line is not accurate: that poll says that 85% of FBS AD's believe that we'll have college football this season, with 99% believing we will have college football sometime this school year.

I think the first is rather optimistic, but the latter much less so ... organizing an eight game conference schedule in the Spring would not be a surprising outcome.

If, according to epidemiologist Sam Scorpino, this is a disease that is about ten times deadlier than influenza, so if 10,000 to 80,000 die per year from influenza, that projects to 100,000 to 800,000 deaths. However, obviously at the upper end of that the mortality rate increases due to the hospital system being overwhelmed ... so if the simple projection is updated to take that into account, that is more like 100,000 to over a million.

There was a projection of 60,000 deaths over a week back, but that was based on best case policy conditions which obviously are not in place ... lockdown until a national testing and tracing program is underway, FEMA not impounding hospital bound protective gear so they can be sold to those hospitals at a higher price, etc. ... with the current death toll at 44,000, 60,000 simply is not going to happen.

And of course, this is not the flu, so there isn't any built in "natural" summer slowdown in the epidemic. The R0 for a flu is around 1.4, given all the partial immunity in place, and that depends a lot on children for keeping the spread up, as the ongoing evolution of flu strains means that older people on average have more partial immunity built up against the current strain, so when school lets out for summer, even fairly novel flu strains slow down their spread until school reopens in fall.

But a disease with an R0 of 2.5 that doesn't rely on kids passing the disease around at school could see it's rate of transmission drop to 2.0 if conditions in summer are not as ideal for its spread, and still experience explosive growth in a state that has too many people who believe the "it's like a flu" storyline and press for premature opening.

It may be that the closures in Ohio and Michigan were early enough that if there is enough test and tracing capacity, most MAC schools can have "hybrid" online/FTF classes in the fall with students on campus by October ... and the MAC can get a system up for testing of student athletes that allows a shortened Fall conference season to take place, with pre-season training in September and a conference schedule in October/November.

And if it falls short, transplanting that to the Spring is not likely to be an insurmountable task.

But Kent State in in late September at Alabama? That'd be massively optimistic.

Well, there were cases of younger people dying from this virus who are healthy. They found that the young between 18 and 35 lets say, this virus causes blood clouts in the lungs that comes lose and causes heart attacks and then strokes. This would put a huge risk on the athletes trying to push to have games when the virus is still going around out there if they never got it. The players from the hotspots could spread the virus in areas that are not. That is for at all levels.

(04-23-2020 09:46 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 02:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  I would not bet on college football happening in 2020.

Can someone state the medical and scientific reasons why it will be safe to have football in the fall?

This is not the relevant question.

For example, many medical experts think that with the CTE issue, football is not medically safe to play at all. Ever.

But we still play it. Why? It's because the question of whether it's medically safe is only one part of the overall question of "should we play football?"

Same concept applies here. There's plenty of positives that come with playing college football. Or going to school. Or voting. Or seeing your friends. Or delivering food to the poor. Or 10,000 other things that we shouldn't ban for a whole year.


I'm not saying college football is the most important thing, or even that we should be playing football. I'm just saying that you're asking the wrong question.

It is the only relevant question.

Will we kill lots of Americans or not?

Will it be safe for crowds or not?

IF not, no other consideration matters.

If I were an AD, I'd be pushing for a permanent spring/fall reversal at this point if it is safe to resume in January 2021. If by some stroke of luck we could have baseball and softball come August, then that would be a bonus.

Football teams that share stadiums might have to be more flexible in January if their co-tenant is a pro team, but after then, they should pretty much be able to schedule freely. It's not like Bryant Denny or Snyder Family Stadium have a ton going on between January and May.

The president of the University of Arizona says it is unlikely that there will be college football in 2020.

University of Arizona president Dr. Robert Robbins said Wednesday that he does not anticipate the Wildcats playing football this fall, even though the university plans to bring students and faculty back to campus for face-to-face instruction during the fall semester.

In an interview with KVOI-AM in Tucson, Arizona, Robbins said he is worried about intercollegiate sports getting back to normal after the coronavirus pandemic.

"I'm really concerned about whether we're going to be playing football in the fall," Robbins told the radio station. "My sense, right now, I just don't see that happening."



https://www.espn.com/college-football/st...ers-needed

(04-23-2020 07:48 PM)TerryD Wrote:  The president of the University of Arizona says it is unlikely that there will be college football in 2020.

University of Arizona president Dr. Robert Robbins said Wednesday that he does not anticipate the Wildcats playing football this fall, even though the university plans to bring students and faculty back to campus for face-to-face instruction during the fall semester.

Yes, to have football, we'd need to abandon the "flatten the curve" approach and adopt the Swedish model of allowing stuff to remain open. You get a sharper, and higher death total, but you also may possibly "get it over with" quicker, so you can open up quicker. More like a Parabola.

The flatten the curve approach is the enemy of football, because by definition it is a strategy of "stringing cases out" over a longer time so as to not overwhelm health care systems. That's kind of where we are at in the USA right now. We've flattened out the curve pretty good in a national sense, but are also at a plateau of about 2,000 deaths a day, and that may carry on for many weeks.

Realistically, since we're not abandoning the flattened curve approach, we aren't going to be leaving the altered mode of life any time soon, not soon enough for football. Good thing, too.

Whatever would have happened, the way this thing spread is what made it so earth-shattering. On February 29 (the day of first death), there were 24 cases in the entire country.

When sports shut down on March 11-12, there was between 1200-1500 cases. Most states waited a week or more after sports stopped to shut down everything. CA was the first state to issue a stay-at-home on the 19th. Some states did not close at all.

We went from 2,800 cases or so nationwide on the 14th to almost 24,000 on the 21st. Whatever chance we had of stopping it ended there.

This prediction site I’ve been looking at (https://covid19-projections.com/) is projecting 140K deaths by August. It projects daily deaths, and we’d still be at 1,000 deaths a day almost to Memorial Day weekend, plateauing at 600 or so a day in June.

It also assumes social distancing would be relaxed slightly nationwide in June, and we’d get a second wave.

This is a no-win situation. Either this, or we’d have 8-10K deaths a day for a month and we would be seen as the laughingstock of the world, maybe even losing our superpower status. And the economy would close anyway, probably taking longer than now.

When in most states, a large “social gathering” is 10 people, and I’ve been watching mass online for 2 months, with no plans on this changing anytime soon, it tells you how far sports are from going back to normal.

We need to get it in our heads that football won't be played until the spring, if it's played at all. Only online classes will be available this fall. Everything is just wishful thinking. Disney/Walt Disney Parks will likely be closed for the remainder of the year. I'm not seeing any positive signs here. Our best bet is to cut our economic losses and keep everything closed down until this virus passes or we find a vaccine first. Then rebuild from there.

(04-23-2020 10:30 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:42 AM)mturn017 Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:27 AM)TripleA Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 07:59 PM)Bronco14 Wrote:  I doubt it. Headlines today were 'Second Outbreak in Fall will be worse'.

Headlines were misleading. The actual quote was regular flu season combined with Covid-19, and we have been playing football during flu season forever.

Not saying we will play, I seriously doubt it, but those headlines were inaccurate. No medical authority is predicting covid-19 will be worse in the fall than it is now.

My guess is college football will be played next spring in a shortened season. Colleges aren't going to willingly give up that revenue if they can figure out a way to safely do it,a nd pushing it back gives them more time to see a drug treatment or vaccine (or herd immunity).

I think if that doesn't work, they will play without fans, or with quite limited seating. Again, in the spring, maybe.

But if we wait until we think nobody else will die, then we won't have an economy. We lose an average of 36K to the flu each year, bad years up to 80K or more, and nobody blinks.

This is worse, contagion wise and for vulnerable people, but we aren't going to save everybody.

OTOH, I don't see it going back to what it was before, as far as large sporting events, for maybe 2 years at the earliest.

Hospitals ability to handle it in the fall will be worse and lead to higher mortality rate. Thus it will be worse. Let's hope that the virus itself doesn't mutate and get worse.

I don’t see that. The big fear was hospitals would be overwhelmed—-and they would run out of beds, ventilators, and PPE. We have used the “flatten the curve” strategy to buy time to realign our industrial production to make more ventilators and PPE and surge hospital space.

Additionally, we will continue to keep many of the social distancing/extra hand washing strategies in place even after the economy is reopened. So, that will tend to reduce the number of Covid-19 cases as well as reducing regular flu. No reason to expect we will be unable to handle a second wave—nor is there any reason to expect it will overwhelm our hospital capacity.

It’s a pandemic. There should be no realistic expectation that we can avoid deaths. There should however be the expectation that should you need a hospital bed or ventilator that one will be available. I think we can now insure that will be the case. That said, will we be in a position to say all clear for bars, concerts, and large sporting events before we have a cure or vaccine? Sadly, I suspect not. Furthermore, even if you do open them—a large chunk of the public knows there is still a chance to get sick. Even if they know they likley won’t die, they may live with or have regular contact with a loved one that is in a high risk group. I think we are going to see a change in consumer behavior over the next 6-18 months.

My guess is, assuming they are allowed—-there will be vastly lower revenue for concerts, movies, bars, and sporting events if they are allowed to reopen. The consumer will simply not be returning to those crowded venues in the same numbers as before the pandemic.

For a year or two, yes. Forever? If that's what you're saying (not sure), I don't buy that. We'll eventually build up immunity and have vaccines. Maybe really old people will forego large events, but not the general population.

(04-23-2020 07:29 PM)TerryD Wrote:  

(04-23-2020 09:46 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(04-22-2020 02:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  I would not bet on college football happening in 2020.

Can someone state the medical and scientific reasons why it will be safe to have football in the fall?

This is not the relevant question.

For example, many medical experts think that with the CTE issue, football is not medically safe to play at all. Ever.

But we still play it. Why? It's because the question of whether it's medically safe is only one part of the overall question of "should we play football?"

Same concept applies here. There's plenty of positives that come with playing college football. Or going to school. Or voting. Or seeing your friends. Or delivering food to the poor. Or 10,000 other things that we shouldn't ban for a whole year.


I'm not saying college football is the most important thing, or even that we should be playing football. I'm just saying that you're asking the wrong question.

It is the only relevant question.

Will we kill lots of Americans or not?

Will it be safe for crowds or not?

IF not, no other consideration matters.

If shutting down football will save 100,000 lives, then we're in agreement: the virus is the only thing that matters.

But that means the virus isn't the only thing that matters. There's two other considerations:
1) Look at the CHANGE in the body count, not the total body count. Will shutting down this particular activity reduce the TOTAL number of deaths?
2) What are the consequences of shutting down this activity?

Compare answers one and two, and choose the lesser of the two evils.

Example of #1 leading to a different answer than your statement: - some people are worried that ordering groceries on Amazon will put Amazon workers in danger. But ordering through the mail is safer than going to the store, so it reduces the TOTAL number of deaths.

Example of #2 leading to a different answer than your statement: Delaying the November election would be catastrophic to public trust in government. This virus is not deadly enough to justify delaying the election.

Again, putting fans on campus and in stadiums without an effective treatment or a vaccine is sheer, stupid lunacy.

It will spread the virus and kill people. Full stop.

It doesn't matter what not doing so does to the economy or college football, or whatever.

We can rebuild the economy but can only bury the additional dead.

(04-24-2020 01:11 PM)TerryD Wrote:  Again, putting fans on campus and in stadiums without an effective treatment or a vaccine is sheer, stupid lunacy.

It will spread the virus and kill people. Full stop.

It doesn't matter what not doing so does to the economy or college football, or whatever.

We can rebuild the economy but can only bury the additional dead.

The question is whether we will have college football this season ... if we somehow do in some parts of the country, it would be in front of empty or mostly empty stadiums.

At some point the regular stores should be able to open, right now it is basically all big box stores. Having all these small business close and other shops close will cause all kinds problems with people not being able to pay their bills, rent/mortgage.. A lot of smaller stores that doesn't have more than 5 or 10 customers in at a time should be allowed to open. Walmart and the Home Improvement stores are packed.

(04-24-2020 01:29 PM)kevinwmsn Wrote:  At some point the regular stores should be able to open, right now it is basically all big box stores. Having all these small business close and other shops close will cause all kinds problems with people not being able to pay their bills, rent/mortgage.. A lot of smaller stores that doesn't have more than 5 or 10 customers in at a time should be allowed to open. Walmart and the Home Improvement stores are packed.

I’ve done my part and mostly stayed home. I don’t live far from a home improvement store and when I’ve been out it really is packed so much more than normal. Maybe it’s because most other stores are closed? The number of cars in the parking lot is reminiscent of the parking lot when a hurricane is coming.