As Universities Cancel In-Person Classes, Why Are Their Teams Playing in Full Arenas?
Indiana University just announced it won’t hold in-person classes until at least April 6 because of the coronavirus. Michigan State won’t hold face-to-face classes until April 20 for the same reason.
But this week, men’s basketball teams from both schools will play in front of 20,000 people 50 miles away from the IU campus.
This is illogical and reckless. There is no rational defense for it. This is not an academic issue or a campus issue. It’s a burgeoning public health crisis, getting worse by the day, and with every game played in front of large crowds, college conferences just feed our worst suspicions about them: The games are more important than classes, and revenue trumps everything else.
A quick recap, since this is sometimes misconstrued: Nobody is saying that if you go to a game today, you’ll probably get COVID-19. Closing arenas immediately is a proactive measure, not a reactive one. It won’t end the coronavirus threat. But it can slow the spread of COVID-19, to avoid overtaxing our medical infrastructure and mitigate the societal damage and death toll as much as possible.
That is why so many jurisdictions around the world have canceled large indoor gatherings. You may think this is an overreaction. But when these schools canceled classes, they came down on the side of many medical professionals. So why don’t their presidents have the guts to, at minimum, keep the fans out of arenas?
The answer may lie less in cold-blooded capitalism than in the speed of events. This story is moving fast for all of us. Three days ago, closing arenas for events felt like an extreme measure to me. Tuesday, I wrote it should happen. By Tuesday night, Michigan State, Indiana, Duke and UCLA joined the growing lists of schools that canceled in-person classes. It is now Wednesday midday. Who knows where we’ll be by nightfall?
Collegiate sports are traditionally such a slow-moving enterprise that the NCAA logo should be a sloth. The NCAA usually needs six committee meetings to schedule another committee meeting. But there is no more time to waste, and the decision has gone from unthinkable to inevitable.
I wrote this Tuesday, but this needs to be said again: It doesn’t matter how big the game is. What matters is how many people are gathered to watch it. Even the location doesn’t matter that much anymore; within a few days, there will almost certainly be COVID-19 cases in all 48 contiguous states. (It is known to be in 41 already (counting D.C.), as of this typing, and that is probably an undercount.)
If holding a 200-person lecture is a public-health risk, how, in good conscience, can you bring 20,000 people into a basketball arena?
There are people using the death rate and total number of dead so far to minimize the story. Don’t fall for it. COVID-19 spreads so quickly that, while young, healthy people can probably withstand contracting it, there is a strong chance they will pass it along to somebody who can’t. Experts are floating numbers like 75-150 million cases and one million dead, all in the U.S. The death toll in Italy just went from 366 to 827 in three days—and Italy has been far more proactive about addressing this than the U.S. has.
More people will die. The question is how many. As a society, we basically have two choices here: Take unprecedented bold steps to contain the virus now, or pay for it later. You would think the leaders of our finest universities would understand that. And they do—unless you put a ball and a hoop in front of them.
