SMQ: College football learned nothing from the 2020 season

College football kicked off the 2021 season on Saturday. If the first games were any indication, we are in for another chaotic pandemic-impacted year.

For college football fans, January 1 spells the denouement of the year instead of its opening act. Rather than hewing to the conventions of the common calendar, gridiron fans exist in a world where their chronometer rolls over in late August. Those of us bitten by the bug of college fanaticism know that our new year begins when the humidity sticks in the air and summer heat glares off metal bleachers, rather than when we cling to images of sunny bowl destinations.

Pandemics change the scale of time in a way that distorts how we perceive our collective reality. Social isolation turns each moment into a slog, making time stand in place. It also makes time fly by unnoticed, as the monotony of an unvarying existence renders each day much like the day before. In a pandemic, the college football offseason drags on even more interminably than it does in normal times.

A lot can change in a year. Last August we wondered whether college football would go on in 2020 in large parts of the country as athletic departments and conferences took divergent approaches to handling the health and wellbeing of their athletes. In the final week of August 2020, the FCS Kickoff presented a vision of what football might look like moving forward and illuminated our national priorities in stark relief. We now have multiple COVID-19 vaccines available, including one that just received full FDA approval, something that hovered as a prerequisite for getting back to some semblance of normality.

At the same time, far fewer changes have occurred than we like to imagine taking place in the previous 365-day window of time. Variants of COVID-19 continue to circulate through the populace, and public health remains mired in a political shell game where part of the populace places its trust in vaccines and others place their trust in veterinary medications. The biggest thing that remains the same, however, is that money ultimately guides university policies and athletic department decision-making far more than doing the right thing by the public.

I came to Penn State in 2019, moving cross-country from California to start a PhD program studying the history and philosophy of sport in the department of Kinesiology. I resigned myself before the season even started to the fact that I would not attend any of Penn State’s seven home wins at Beaver Stadium that year, as I ramped back up into duties as both a teaching assistant and a graduate student. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, assuming that I would get a chance to knock a dream venue off my list the following year.

Then the first surge of COVID-19 caused the university to pivot toward remote education in March 2020. Originally it looked like the Big Ten would prioritize athlete health and eschew college football entirely with the pandemic raging on, but the league ultimately reversed its decision and opted for a truncated schedule of conference play. Spectators were kept out of the stands for the entire season. My first visit to Beaver Stadium took place not during a whiteout against Big Ten competition but for the two times, I was selected for random asymptomatic COVID-19 testing during the fall 2020 semester.

My first visit to Beaver Stadium took place not during a whiteout against Big Ten competition but for the two times I was selected for random asymptomatic COVID-19 testing during the fall 2020 semester.

Combine that with the 0-5 start put up by the Nittany Lions and it added up to little joy in Happy Valley last season. In many ways, the 2020 season was one that all but a handful of teams would love to set in the dustbin of history. But with vaccines coming to the public at the beginning of 2021, it felt like we could do just that soon enough.

Beaver Stadium will be back to full capacity this year, as more than 107,000 full-throated fans bring their outsized energy back to the venerable venue. I will not, however, be among the throngs that pile into that giant Erector set this year.

Like many universities around the country, Penn State has opted to fill its stands to capacity at Beaver Stadium this fall. Once again, after a year away, more than 107,000 fans will bring their full-throated energy back to the venerable venue for each of the seven games hosted in State College this season.

Also like many universities around the country, Penn State opted to fill its stands to capacity while limiting its mask mandate to indoor spaces within the stadium. The Nittany Lions athletic department also decided there was no reason to require COVID-19 vaccinations or negative COVID-19 tests to walk through the turnstiles.

It is a calculus every fan must make on an individual basis. Even with a full schedule of Moderna vaccine in my system and an extensive mask collection, the risk/reward factor skews too heavily toward risk in my case. Both my wife and I have too many preexisting health risks to risk bringing COVID-19 into our household for the reward of live football. For the same reason why I am teaching two classes online this semester, I will not be among the unmasked masses flocking into the student section or buying up high-priced tickets to get into the game this year.

The responses from athletic departments mirror those of the campuses to which they are anchored. While Penn State mandated masks in all indoor spaces on campus this fall, they also refrained from mandating vaccines for students, faculty, or staff. In this way, the Beaver Stadium policies are just as cavalier about how to substantively address pandemic conditions as the policies across the larger university community.

The packed stands and the throngs of unmasked spectators during the Nebraska-Illinois game showed the lengths to which we as a society will stick our fingers in our ears, cover our eyes, and pretend that the pandemic has completely subsided.

I thought about this a lot as I watched a full slate of college football yesterday for the first time in more than a year.

Last season, out of respect to my wife’s discomfort watching unpaid laborers in a pandemic, I scaled back the amount of TV space I dedicated to the game. Yesterday, after a year of watching professional sports make their return and spending the past month watching Olympics and Paralympics coverage, we have (for better or worse) both become far more desensitized to pandemic sport.

The 2020 FCS Kickoff provided a window into how strange last season would play out for players, broadcasters, and spectators alike. In Week Zero, the packed stands and the throngs of unmasked spectators during the Nebraska-Illinois game showed the lengths to which we as a society will stick our fingers in our ears, cover our eyes, and pretend that the pandemic has completely subsided.

Champaign County has seen rising hospitalizations in recent weeks and might have just hosted its biggest superspreader event to date. Yet the story after the Illinois blowout won’t be the packed house or the lack of precautions to prevent viral spread but rather the temperature of Scott Frost’s seat as the former national championship-winning Cornhuskers quarterback finds his coaching return to Lincoln reaping far fewer rewards.

Neither college football nor institutions of higher education nor society at large have learned any valuable lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. We are taking fewer precautions than we did last season despite Delta variants surging through the population.

Even as those Americans already dead from the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic could fill Beaver Stadium six times over, the scenes from Week Zero reveal our basest of priorities. Because we as a society generate so much meaning from the gridiron, we continue to show our willingness to risk our health for a trip to the stadium.