Suffice to say, the NCAA isn’t exactly optimistic there will be a college football season this year. At least, at this time they’re not.
Thursday afternoon, the NCAA released an updated set of return-to-sports guidelines, including football. It should be noted that all of these guidelines are merely recommendations from the NCAA and are not requirements. Yet.
The most noteworthy of the recommendations is that, in high-contact-risk sports, testing should occur 72 hours ahead of an athletic competition taking place. Included in the testing is getting the results back in that same timeframe.
Obviously, football would very much be considered a high-contact-risk sport.
Below are some of the other guidelines recommended by the NCAA:
- Daily self-health checks.
- The appropriate use of face coverings and social distancing during training, competition and outside of athletics.
- Testing strategies for all athletics activities, including pre-season, regular season and post-season.
- Member schools must adhere to public health standards set by their local communities.
“Any recommendation on a pathway toward a safe return to sport will depend on the national trajectory of COVID-19 spread,” said Brian Hainline, NCAA chief medical officer, in a statement. “The idea of sport resocialization is predicated on a scenario of reduced or flattened infection rates.”
In his own statement, the president of the NCAA sounded an ominous alarm for fall sports, including football.
“When we made the extremely difficult decision to cancel last spring’s championships it was because there was simply no way to conduct them safely,” said Mark Emmert. “This document lays out the advice of health care professionals as to how to resume college sports if we can achieve an environment where COVID-19 rates are manageable. Today, sadly, the data point in the wrong direction. If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle on the pandemic.”
The NCAA provided a graphic to show just how precarious the college football season is at the moment.
