Sports’ Cruel Summer

By Ed Desser and John Kosner

Back in March, the NBA led a series of “postponements” and the sports industry hunkered down with the hope that play could resume over the summer. Sports has experienced a lost (NHL) season and shortened (NBA, NFL and MLB) ones before, but had never been entirely “on hiatus.” Now, we’re mid-summer, and the re-starts have begun (motorsports, golf, MLB and, last week, the NBA and NHL, so far successfully in their respective bubbles). Amidst the progress, however, the nationwide spike in COVID-19 infections is feeding a new crisis. On July 23 in “Bloomberg” Opinion, Joe Nocera wrote under the headline, “Covid-19 Has the Power to Break the Sports World” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-22/sports-face-an-existential-crisis-in-a-season-of-covid-19 Back on May 1, ESPN published an economics study that found: “The sudden disappearance of sports will erase at least $12B in revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs, an economic catastrophe that will more than double if the college football & NFL schedules are wiped out this fall by the coronavirus pandemic.”

The $ 11-figure scenario may be upon us this fall. Here’s why:

1. The precariousness of staging sports during COVID-19. In the Wall Street Journal on July 16, Jack Swarbrick, the Athletic Director at Notre Dame, reported, “We’re mid-July and the trends are the wrong way … it’s the environment around us collapsing.” Notre Dame is arguably the most storied school in college football, the only one with its own…