When the Football Bowl Branch begins its season in a week, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves plans to be in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, watching Southern Miss face southern Alabama from a seat at M.M. Roberts Stadium.
There is no doubt in Reeves’ brain that it is to play football at school in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and few questions about the price of the game for society at large.
“It’s amazing for the intellectual fitness and psyche of every Mississippian we have school football,” Reeves told USA TODAY Sports Tuesday.
However, at Southern Miss, a return to school football is a void. In Hattiesburg, and in dozens of other university towns across the country, bringing football back will also mean bringing thousands of enthusiasts back to the stadiums.
As college leaders continue to face the challenge of even betting on a school football season, which two Power Five meetings have deemed dangerous, most ACC, Big 12 and SEC schools are just preparing to play, they are also preparing. to accommodate crowds with limited capacity in their stadiums, along with social estrangement protocols and conscientiously designed masks.
Of the 39 schools at those 3 conferences, 20 have announced their goal of hosting up to 20% to 30% of their stadium capacity, which can attract crowds ranging from 11,000 enthusiasts (at Georgia Tech) to 25,600 (in Texas AM).
Only three schools in Power Five (Boston College, Duke and West Virginia) said they would receive enthusiasts at the start of the season.
The general preference for school football to welcome enthusiasts makes it special in American sports. So far, MLB, NBA and NHL games have been held behind closed doors, and most NFL groups have indicated that they will open their season in empty stadiums.
For some public fitness experts, the concept of thousands of stadium enthusiasts, even with established protocols, is worrying. Ronald Waldman, a global fitness professor at George Washington University, called it a “bridge too far.” Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said in a call with reporters last week that it would be “a disaster.”
“If all you do is propose masking and social estrangement, and you have no way of doing it … I find it a very difficult proposition,” said Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist in New York. Bellevue University and Hospital.
Those responsible for the sports industry, for their part, are confident in their projects, many of which have been underway for several months. Protocols vary slightly from school to school, but largely inspire or require the use of masks, and come with layers of social distance that measure the gaming experience.
“It’s nothing to take lightly,” said Josh Brooks, Georgia’s assistant athletics director. “We know it’s a big responsibility and we know those rules are important.”
Brooks said the Georgia Department of Sports had begun painting its plan for Sanford Stadium in April and early May, local and state government regulations, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as a guide.
At the heart of the school plan, and at most in others, is the concept of social estrangement, creating at least six feet of separation between enthusiasts whenever possible. This starts with the seating arrangement, in which the fan blocks are stamped in combination in all instructions through empty seats. The same concept applies to stadium access points, where steel detectors are spaced, and in the hallway, where you will have a full set of concession stands for a fraction of stadium enthusiasts.
Brooks said the school had never planned to house several fans, but reversed what social estrangement measures would allow. Sports branch staff even made hand-made maps of individual sections of the stadium, he said.
Georgia nevertheless made the decision to open the stadium up to 20-25% of its overall capacity. With the fifth largest stadium in the country’s campus, this translates into a maximum of about 23,180 fans.
“I feel that this number, this percentage, gives us the opportunity to pull this off in a manner that will allow people to move without being congested, and the lines should flow quickly,” Brooks said.
Decisions on express capacity limits and social distance protocols have been made through individual schools, in collaboration with national or local fitness authorities. But the top universities, especially in the Power Five, adhere to the same general pattern.
Printed tickets, for example, will be largely replaced by cellular tickets. The concession stands will not have cash and will be designed as “takeaway”. Fans will be required to wear a mask when entering or exiting stadiums, or when walking in the hallway. (Some schools also require enthusiasts to wear masks on their seats unless they eat or drink.)
Even the minor main points were even taken into account; As a component of its Fan Health and Safety Guidelines, the SEC asks its members to offer condiments to serve individually in their stadiums.
Some consulted with external entities such as Populous, an architecture company specializing in sports facilities, to outline the distribution of seats and perfect the protocols of the stadium.
Scott Radecic, former NFL player and senior director of the company, said the company’s architects had combined their understanding of stadium design with the experience of an internal event planning group, teams such as crowd modeling software to identify potential bottlenecks and tactics to facilitate crowd flow.
Radecic said the company had also consulted with public fitness experts and doctors, one of whom the other stadium protocols for “Swiss cheese layers.”
“A single mitigation measure will not necessarily be one hundred percent effective,” Radecic explained. “But when you start superimposing all those other degrees of mitigation on the most sensitive to each other, it starts to plug the holes in each of the Swiss cheese pieces, so that the plan becomes stronger, more efficient.”
Gounder, the infectious disease specialist, said the progression of all those rules governs one thing. Applying them is another.
“In fact, I find it hard to think that these measures are really going to protect other people, by saying” you have to do those things,” that other people are really going to fulfill and that they’re going to work,” he said.
Gene Taylor, Kansas State’s director of sports, said COVID-19 countermeasures at Bill Snyder Family Stadium will be implemented like all other regulations in the game. The stadium will have about 75% of its same staff of bailiffs, price lockers and security guards, it is only 25% of the capacity of the fans, he added.
“(We will put the protocols in place) as much as we can, as any other visitor service,” Taylor said. “As in a normal game, it doesn’t stick to one of the rules of our stadium.”
To ensure a uniform distribution of enthusiasts and crowds, some schools have also made the decision to divide their stadiums into other areas. Memphis, for example, has established four quadrants at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, each with a parking area, an access point, restrooms and food stalls.
In many cases, however, officials acknowledge that this is a matter of trust. At the end of a game, the school can open more doors to check and avoid bottlenecks in an exit; however, enthusiasts should use them in the end.
One of the toughest decisions Taylor had to make at Kansas State was to ban tailgating and back-to-back, disrupting a long culture of enthusiasts leaving the stadium at halftime to wreck their cars.
“In a general year, if we had done that, it wouldn’t have gone very well,” Taylor said. “I still don’t think it’s going very well, yet (the fans) perceive it.”
The Wildcats are promoting beer and wine for the first time in the stadium’s general sections.
In Mississippi, where pre-game festivities at The Grove at Oxford and The Junction in Starkville are synonymous with school football games, Reeves even went so far as to ban scorching statewide in a decree, while restricting stadium attendance to 25%.
“We are so smart in (scuring) now that, in my opinion, it lends itself to the prospect of being a high-risk environment for the spread of this virus,” Reeves said.
“We know we’re going to be under the microscope. We know that there are other meetings that have chosen not to play football, and we are in a situation where the other meetings and others in other parts of the country would.” Do it. I like nothing more than to keep it from working. So we have to be very careful. And that’s why we said, at this level of the season, don’t do wheel sucking.”
Others, on the other hand, are moving forward. Five Power Five – Florida State, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Tennessee and Texas – have indicated that they will allow tailgating, albeit in a different way. They all inspire social distance from the back doors or, in some cases, restrict the length of tents or grounds.
“We realize that (tailgating) is a component of the day of fitness enjoyed by many price ticket holders,” FSU sports director David Coburn said in a statement.
As mayor of Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, Kelly Girtz understands what Bulldogs football means to the community. But he also said there is “absolutely some unease” in his component at the concept of having 23,000 enthusiasts at Sanford Stadium for Georgia’s opening game on October 3, with protocols or not.
Girtz said he involved that crowds in football games can simply create a “network” of transmission between SEC cities, expanding the threat of COVID-19 spreading across their cities, collectively. He is involved in the peripheral activities that accompany football: parties, school trips, county enthusiasts or neighboring states to attend a game. And he is involved in the burden that football matches at school with enthusiasts can pose to lifeguards in Athens.
“We are the medical center of at least one region of 12 counties,” Girtz told USA TODAY Sports on Monday. “And I don’t need our emergency doctors and extensive care in our two primary hospitals here to also be overloaded with the extra things that are an integral component of a football weekend.”
Girtz said decisions about football game enthusiasts in Georgia were made through state fitness public officials and that their workplace was not involved. If those cases had been different, he added, the final results might have been different.
Brooks, meanwhile, said the Georgia Department of Sports will continue to work with campus officials, the public fitness government and the SEC, and will tailor its plans as needed. (Athens-Clarke County recorded a total of 2,628 COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, with 26 deaths since March).
“We will do everything in our power to provide the safest environment imaginable for everyone who attends our games,” Brooks said.
In the end, it is conceivable that the participation of fans in football matches is connected to the dynamics of transmission on campus. Three schools in ACC, North Carolina, North Carolina and Notre Dame have already suspended face-to-face learning. None of the 3 have announced their intention to participate in football matches.
Girtz, for his part, said he would not go to Sanford Stadium this fall. It’s afraid of being a transmission vector.
“I think we want to locate a path to our morale (in the midst of COVID-19),” he added later. “I would say you can find a way to keep your brain and do it safely.”
Contact Tom Schad on [email protected] or Twitter @Tom_Schad.