Not sure I’ve seen this mentioned upthread.
The VR/AR tech pivot could be accelerated as a result of COVID.
This might mean empty (or no more) arenas, and (multiple) sales of virtual seats.
I’ve never played sport at a high enough level to have experienced a real crowd, or home field advantage.
Clearly we believe Cameron and the Crazies provide an advantage.
In the grand scheme of things, in person versus tv/virtual is trivial.
What we think of as normal is going to continue to change as a result of COVID.
When is our society going to step up and realize there is no such thing as a “safe” environment? How likely is it that virtually all of us have already been exposed to others who have been infected w/o those others becoming ill? And what about over the next 3-4 months? The talk of quarantining teams, classes, workplaces because a single person therein tests positive becomes more and more overkill as time goes on. Who will argue that anyone can be “safe” by never being exposed to the virus? Are we all to live in bubbles for the rest of our lives? There is risk to everything in life. Natural selection is not disappearing. While we want to all within reason to mitigate loss of life, drs, government, and all who proclaim society should do anything which might prevent a single person from death cannot effect such. Vaccines will not protect everyone and will result in some deaths-do we ban them because of that? We cannot prevent disease, nor all of its consequences. We need a return to normalcy in a step by step process not lasting 18 months as called for by some.
Even with social distancing, Covid-19 is about to be the leading cause of death in the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...ng-cause-death
I'm not sure what there is to be skeptical about.
Now let's steer this back to sports...
-jk
To be skeptical of the lessons imparted by historical fact can prove painful and costly. For those who advocate abandoning the restrictions recommended by health care experts to facilitate a hasty resumption of normal social and commercial activities, I urge you to Google "1918 Flu Pandemic second wave" and read a representative sample of the articles. Then consider the potential consequences of casting the masses back into the daily mix before we have developed an effective treatment that can be made available in adequate quantities to prevent the same dramatic second-wave increases in severe illness and loss of life that occurred the last time we encountered a problem of this nature.
College basketball practice begins October 15, 179 days from now. Is it probable that this viral scourge will have remediated enough by then to permit full contact practice, airline travel, and stadiums occupied by fans, even if not densely occupied?
Vaccines were developed over years which--thankfully--eliminated polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, human pappiloma, yellow fever, rabies, and hepatitis B. Unfortunately, despite millions in research dollars having been spent, there is no vaccine for herpes, HIV, dengue fever, or the common cold, The vaccine for the flu is a mixed bag.
Is there a guarantee that there will ever be a Covid-19 vaccine? No. Is there a possibility there will be a vaccine in 179 days? Again, no.
I am no scientist and I have no crystal ball, but if there are college athletics before the fall of 2021, I will be pleasantly surprised (on many levels, and not mostly because of sports.)
First they will have to figure out how to re-open colleges and universities, because the notion that "student athletes" will play games while universities are unoccupied is a pipe dream. It's not going to happen.
Lacking a vaccine (which I agree could take a very long time), some kind of robust testing and tracking regimen is going to be required. Right now we are clearly lacking a focused national effort (that's all I can get away with saying here), but we're going to have to get one organized, one way or another. If we can't completely solve the problem with a vaccine, we're going to have to manage it as best we can.
4Gen may well be right; at this point, I don't see how they play football this Fall...a lot can (hopefully) happen before hoops are jeopardized, but our current national approach is not encouraging...maybe that changes?
How many voted more optimistically in the poll than they deep down truly believe? I think I may have. This issue is soooo complicated, so many unknowns.
Please keep general comments about the corona virus in the appropriate thread.
-jk
Colleges are already going online for fall semester, and some students are planning to take the semester off in protest. Duke has made no announcement yet.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...er/5157756002/
There's still a lot of time before decisions have to be made on the sports front. 7/15 for football, probably 10/1 for basketball, and probably 1/1 for spring sports.
The article is a bit sensationalist, as the big number they put up, 68% or whatever, includes schools "considering" it. If duke had contingency plans for a remote fall semester, are they in that bucket? Probably.
They cited a 5% number of college who are committed to online classes. Does that mean those schools will also have NO on-campus learning? They don't clarify nor cite their source (and the report they do cite doesn't validate that number).
So in terms of hard facts, the universities have no clue what's going to happen. They're preparing contingency plans which might include remote learning. Saying "colleges are going online for the fall semester" is mildly sensationalist at this point.
I imagine for duke, and thus sports, the university will do everything in their power to get students here...if it means they have to have students arrive over a 4 week period and individually test every single one of them as they arrive, require that they quarantine when not in class, and have all staff tested. The possibility of such, who knows. It would be much more feasible for the football team size-wise, and I imagine they are working on some sort of stringent rules there as well....testing of team personnel and players, restricted to living in some dorm, etc.
Whether either is feasible depends on the number and veracity of the tests available at the time...as well as the current city/county/state policies in effect and the overall infection spread in the immediate region. We don't know what that'll look like, and neither does with the university, so i'm more shocked that there are 32% of universities that AREN'T considering whether they'll be online. I expect duke to have many many contingency plans, and if I were a betting person, I'd say football starts. Maybe we play in an empty stadium. But I believe it will happen. People are protesting here to open things up. What do you think they're going to do in football hotbeds like bama or louisiana if someone tries to tell them they can't play?
1200. DDMF.
Wonder if you could have a football game with fans 6 ft apart.
Some schools could do that now # wise ( no names).
Would probably be impossible to monitor / enforce.
Maybe tell folks if there are too many violations you don’t allow any fans. Might be fun.
Not practical but interesting.
Interesting story today on Bloomberg.com about the implication for college athletic budgets with the ongoing fallout of Covid-19:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-like-clemson