Southpaw #9: When Do Bubbles Burst?

The NCAA is speculating with students’ lives, and the bet might not pay off.

Dear Readers,

We hope all of you have a lovely Thanksgiving this week, and do your best to not spread COVID to your immediate families. All indications are pointing towards a rough winter, but if you can’t see family, at least you have Southpaw Report bringing you analysis on one small part of our collective descent into madness. Today’s story is about the NCAA, an organization that has behaved badly for decades. The COVID outbreak has exposed its special concoction of greed and ignorance, but we should remember that it was not COVID that determined the way the NCAA has always chosen to treat the student-athletes ostensibly in its care.

-Calder and Ian

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The NCAA is doubling down on its superspreader-friendly COVID stance

On name recognition alone, the Ivy League is one of the most famous college sports conferences in America. And while it did not achieve that status because of its stellar athletics, it is still a Division I conference, which means that every March, the winners of the men’s and women’s basketball conference championships get an automatic bid to their respective March Madness tournaments.

March Madness is undoubtedly one of the most lively sporting events of the year. Both the men’s and women’s 64 team single-elimination tournaments create ample opportunities for upsets, and every year, the month-long drama captivates Americans who haven’t otherwise watched a minute of college basketball all year. So, on March 10th of 2020, when the Ivy League canceled their postseason tournament due to coronavirus concerns, people were angry. This effete group of schools, critics argued, had thrown all of March Madness out of whack. Two days later, of course, the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) canceled the whole event. As it turns out, it was not Ivy League liberals who had imperiled the tournament, but a pandemic. 

For a little while in March and April, Americans hesitantly accepted this fact. But as professional sports leagues resumed play, many expected the NCAA, and especially its big-money football conferences, to follow suit. And so they did. Some drama ensued around the beginning of the college football season, as President Trump claimed that he brought back Big Ten football, but for the most part, the season has continued uninterrupted, even as COVID cases on college football teams skyrocketed. (Georgia Southern recently played one of their games with THIRTY-THREE of their players unavailable). 

The most famous current college football player in the country, Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, tested positive for COVID in late October, and his coach Dabo Swinney didn’t miss a beat, telling the press, “This is an opportunity for other guys to step up.” It is unclear whether anyone has informed Mr. Sweeney that the novel coronavirus cannot hear him when he does his tough-guy-coach-speak, but it seems clear that guys like Dabo will keep repeating stock phrases usually reserved for ACL tears or pesky concussions right up until (and maybe even past! who knows!) one of his players literally dies. 

Plenty of observers have pointed out the utter depravity of asking unpaid laborers to risk their long term health to preserve the NCAA’s bottom line. But money talks louder than common sense, so instead of playing it safe as the country enters what is quickly turning into the most dangerous period of the pandemic thus far, the NCAA has doubled down with an even more reckless plan to save their biggest moneymaker: March Madness. 

NCAA vs. NBA

What the NCAA has proposed for the men’s tournament is similar to the “bubble” tactic that the NBA employed for the conclusion of its season. (The NCAA has not yet announced a plan for its women’s tournament.) Instead of being played at arenas around the country, all games will be hosted in a single city (probably Indianapolis), and all players will be required to stay in a controlled environment. 

While the NCAA’s plan is similar to the NBA’s, it is not the same—and the differences matter. By trying to replicate the success of pro basketball’s playoffs without taking all the same precautions that the NBA took, the NCAA has misunderstood why the NBA’s bubble worked in the first place. In the process, it’s endangering not only its own prospect of success, but also the lives of the players, coaches, staff members, and workers that it’s dragging into its very fragile bubble. 

Let’s look at some of the differences. At the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, the NBA’s regular season was drawing to a close. As the league made plans to restart the season in early July, it left the eight teams who were mathematically out of playoff contention at home. The players and coaches on the 22 teams that were invited into the Disney World bubble were required to quarantine at home before traveling to Florida, and once there, they were only allowed into team facilities to practice individually for a predetermined pre-season period. Once the season resumed, those inside the bubble participated in an extremely expensive and consistent testing program and remained under constant supervision. 

It is painfully obvious that the NCAA’s bubble will not be as thorough or as safe. First of all, there’s no single complex in Indianapolis that can accommodate all of the players, coaches, and media who are needed to put on the tournament, so the league will probably have to use four arenas that are more than five miles apart to play early games. The NCAA’s “bubble” will be less a bubble than a hamster tunnel-esque  nightmare of potential infection. 

Secondly, the NCAA has an issue with scale. Mark Emmert, the NCAA’s president, has already admitted that it’s unlikely that the bubble will be able to accommodate the usual 68 teams that participate in March Madness, but even if the NCAA allows only 32 teams into the bubble, that would still be more players and staff members than the NBA ever considered including in its bubble. Every additional player presents another potential vector, further increasing the likelihood of a large-scale outbreak. 

Third, the NCAA has not thought out its timeline. Generally, collegiate teams play in their conference tournaments, which often determine who gets into March Madness, in the days leading up to the first round of March Madness. Even if the NCAA decides to push March Madness back to accommodate team quarantines, what happens if a player tests positive during a conference tournament? Are they ineligible for all postseason play? What happens if that player is a star? And what happens if a player tests positive while in the bubble? Will the NCAA do what’s necessary to prevent an outbreak, even if it means shutting down the tournament?

And finally, lest we forget, college athletes are not paid. So while NBA teams could threaten players with suspension without pay for breaking the rules in the Orlando bubble, the same incentive structure does not work for the NCAA. The NCAA’s payday will depend on the good judgment of hundreds of college kids, which, as the country has learned this fall, is not a particularly good bet. 

Emmert has basically admitted that the NCAA is doing the equivalent of crossing its fingers and hoping for the best. “I'm actually pretty optimistic given all of the brainpower and energy and, frankly, money that's being put on the testing issue in the private sector as well as the public sector, that we're months away ... from having much higher quality antigen testing… and at a cheaper price point,” he said, almost putting subject-verb-object together to explain the league’s testing protocol. He might be right about this. There might even be a vaccine that’s being rolled out by March. (Though probably not widely.) But the most depressing thing is, it doesn’t really matter. Even if Emmert is wrong, the NCAA will push forward with its plan. Just as they have done with football, the NCAA will risk the well-being of its unpaid student-athletes and everyone who comes into contact with these kids so that they can continue to make money. 

If you wanted to be charitable to Emmert, you could say he was doing what any good commissioner would do by looking out for the financial interests of the NCAA’s member institutions as well as the NCAA itself. When March Madness was canceled the first time around, the NCAA lost $375 million in projected revenue that it would have distributed to member schools to bolster their budgets. This hurt a lot of academic institutions that were relying on some of those funds. At best, his decision is based on an attempt to help struggling schools and a misunderstanding of public health more than it is in plain avarice. But forgive us if we aren’t feeling so generous towards an institution that has proven over and over that it has no concern for its students’ health, financial well-being, or education. 

As you may have guessed from our decision to run a sports newsletter, we miss sports. And while professional leagues have come back with varying degrees of moral ambiguity attached to their restarts, at least the participants involved are being paid for their services or have the option to opt out without endangering their academic careers. Not so with the NCAA. Given that a vaccine appears to be coming soon—but not likely soon enough for March Madness to proceed as normal—it takes a special brand of depravity to ask 18-year-olds to participate in a hastily thrown together plan that prioritizes money they will never see over their own wellbeing. This is March.

Go Deeper

For a story about how opting out of the COVID football season may cost a student-athlete his academic future: “A Cal Football Player Opted Out Because of the Virus. Then Came the Tuition Bill.” By Billy Witz in The New York Times (November 20, 2020).

For college football’s myriad difficulties containing the coronavirus: “College football whiffs in tackling the coronavirus” by Paul Newberry in AP (September 16, 2020).

For more details on Mark Emmert’s college basketball plan: “Mark Emmert says using bubbles for championships in 2021 'perfectly viable'” by Jeff Borzello in ESPN (August 13, 2020).

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RODNEY’S ROUNDUP

Do you want to read about . . .

. . . European Football fans demanding an anti-corporate stand from their favorite team? “Yes, Politics Do Belong in Sports” by Juliet Jacques in Jacobin (November 17, 2020).

. . . How the history of bloody Sunday is connected to Irish athletics? “100 Years On, Bloody Sunday Still Bleeds” by Charles P. Pierce in Defector (November 22, 2020).

. . . ‘America’s Team’ leading the way (in the worst way possible) on the pandemic? “No One Is Going to Stop the Dallas Cowboys From Risking Their Fans' Lives” by Nick Greene in Slate (November 20, 2020).