Bowl games and COVID

Steven Lubet points out how the reckless decision on the part of Rutgers University to decide to play a football game after all of a week’s notice is being affected by the team’s coach’s massive personal conflict of interest in the matter.

The background here is that Texas A&M was supposed to play Wake Forest in the Gator Bowl in Orlando tomorrow morning. TAMU had to drop out a week ago because of a major COVID outbreak on its roster. Instead of just cancelling the game — to this point five bowl games have been cancelled as a result of COVID outbreaks on team rosters — ESPN demanded that a replacement be found. ETA: A friend points out to me that at least one of the cancelled bowl games, as well at TAMU’s dropping out of the Gator Bowl, have been caused by a combination of COVID infections and player opt-outs [see below], which together have left teams like TAMU and UCLA without enough players available to field plausible game rosters.

So Rutgers’s players have been dragooned into this farcical situation at the last moment. This is because basically everything about big time college football is dictated by the programming whims of television networks, especially ESPN. And, in the context of the COVID pandemic, ESPN has decided that, when it comes to its critical New Year’s Eve college football programming — the two college football playoff games are being played on the network tomorrow and the Gator Bowl is the setup game for that, which is why it’s being played at the absurd time of 11 AM eastern — the spice must flow.

As Steve notes, rounding up players who had played what they thought was their last football game for at least nine months (or in the case of seniors, their last football game ever) and sending them out to play on such short notice after weeks of inactivity and almost no pregame practice time heightens the already high injury risk associated with the sport.

Worse yet, Rutgers’ head coach Greg Schiano is the person who was entrusted by his administrative superiors with making the decision to play:

It is understandable that the Rutgers administration would want to play a game even under difficult circumstances. Bowl games provide a school with visibility on national television, which helps recruiting for both the football team and student body. Alumni donors love to congregate at bowl games, and Rutgers has not played in the post-season since 2014.

One might expect Coach Schiano to be more protective of his players, many of whom he will need for success next season, but he has his own perverse incentive.

According to Schiano’s reported contract, he is paid an additional $100,000 – over and above his $4 million annual salary – simply for appearing in the Gator Bowl, and another $100,000 if he manages to pull off a win. As I explained yesterday in The Hill, such game-specific incentives should be prohibited as conflicts of interest. Although a coach would never admit risking player safety for the sake of a hefty payout, the prospect of so much money creates a temptation, if only subliminally, that is hard to deny.

Although the conflict remains potential in most instances – will the coach, with the game on the line, keep a star player in the lineup despite a nagging injury? – in this case it is unmistakable. Schiano’s players would be 100% safer if Rutgers declined the game, but the greatest benefits, financial and otherwise, inure to the university and the coach.

The players are no doubt thrilled to be getting to the Gator Bowl, but they make their decisions with the enthusiasm and recklessness of youth. They do have the option of sitting out, but the underclassmen are under heavy pressure, even if unstated, to avoid disappointing their coach. It should be up to the adults to weigh the actual costs and rewards of last-minute post-season play. At Rutgers, it appears that player safety lost.

Given his $100,000 incentive to accept the invitation, Schiano should have been completely recused from participation in the university’s Gator Bowl decision. Instead, he was entrusted with polling the players about whether they were sufficiently “fired up” for the game. “This is a team that will be ready to play,” he predictably assured the administration and fans.

“Trust me,” Schiano declared. When it comes to such glaring conflicts of interest, that can never be the right response.

I would just add here that in fact this year a lot of star college football players — many dozens in fact — have achieved enough combination of financial prudence and class consciousness to tell their coaches that actually no, they’re not going to play in these ridiculous exhibition games for no compensation, not when the NFL draft is lurking around the corner, and the risk of injury in said stupid exhibitions is always there.

Anyway, the whole business of playing and/or cancelling bowl games despite or because of COVID outbreaks among the players themselves is a really nice illustration of our society’s bizarre version of risk assessment in the context of the pandemic.

The players themselves — extraordinarily fit 20 year olds who are in almost all cases fully vaccinated — face essentially no personal health risk from COVID, or at least the health risk they face can be calculated as being around .001% as much as the health risk they face from, you know, playing football. Infected players can of course transmit the disease to others, which ultimately is the underlying rationale for canceling bowl games because of roster outbreaks.

But this “players can transmit the virus” rationale is just wildly irrational in the context of playing college football bowl games at all. Consider tomorrow’s Cotton Bowl, which is being played in Jerry Jones’s sybaritic playpen in Irving, Texas. This is an indoor stadium that holds 80,000 fans, for what is a completely sold out game! (The stadium has a retractable roof that could make the venue at least somewhat open-air, although this is almost never done per Jones’s personal preferences, and is still only being “considered” as an option for tomorrow).

The point is that the COVID transmission risk created by bowl games is almost entirely a function of holding the games themselves — even though most bowl games are being played outside, playing them at all guarantees that spectators attending them will spend lots of time in high transmission contexts, even when the stands themselves don’t qualify as such.

The fact that a coach like Schiano has a six-figure incentive to throw his players at the last minute into a game they’re not ready to play [insert lame joke here about Rutgers ever being ready to play a high level football game] just puts an exclamation point on all this nonsense.