College Sports, “Bubbles”, and Athlete Exploitation
Expect college coaches to begin advocating online instruction when they realize it could make bubbles possible. Even when it puts athletes at risk.
Major college sports face a trapeze of their own making. They’ve long insisted players are not professionals worthy of pay. At the same time, those same athletes face full-time commitments to teams that generate millions of dollars in revenue for schools.
In the coming months, colleges and universities will face life and death decisions amidst budgetary catastrophes. There’s reason to worry whether they’ll prioritize student health or revenues.
School administrators tend to be better at managing bureaucracy than understanding crisis. The long history of the NCAA failing to protect athletes leaves even more reason for concern.
While up to this point, most top coaches have remained relatively quiet on the prospect of a season, none have hinted a season won’t be played. It seems likely that smaller athletic programs won’t face the same pressures to avoid cancelling seasons, but Power-5 conferences will.
No matter how much people celebrate amateurism in college sports, it is a venture in exploitation. It will be more obvious if they play a season, but the NCAA has bred an environment okay with that.
Contrary to popular belief, stolen wages aren’t the only problematic function of college sports. Schools and coaches have the power to limit where an athlete transfers if they’re unhappy. If players have professional prospects, coaches can badmouth them to scouts and undermine their value. Athletes’ dreams are in the hands of everyone but themselves.
This breeds a dangerous culture. Players are pressured not to question authorities and often do whatever they can to ingratiate themselves. That can mean playing through injuries and putting their long-term health at risk with no disability benefits.
No cultural institution has better bred its fan base to ignore player safety than college sports. Putting athletes at risk without fair compensation has been the foundation of the NCAA since it was founded in 1906.
Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, the pieces of a perfect storm are there. Plunging revenues, constrained player power, and fanatical fan bases could push decision makers to throw caution to the wind and ensure a season happens. Just one thing is in the way: in-person classes.
Travel remains the primary complication for organized sports. Even with the United States’ expanded testing apparatus, the country still doesn’t have enough tests. Given the propensity of COVID-19, every time a player, coach, or team travels, they’d need another test. That’s a problem.
To avoid this, most leagues have moved towards “bubbles” where all players, coaches, and game staff are isolated in one location. Since travel is removed from the equation, if you keep COVID-19 out of the bubble the environment remains safe. Of course, that proposition is far easier said than done.
Leagues that have attempted to create these ecosystems have struggled to keep the virus from entering. The pandemic is simply too advanced for sports right now. Sadly that won’t stop leagues from insisting they can play anyway.
While it seems top coaches haven’t realized it yet, moving classes online would make college sports bubbles possible. With campuses unused, they become an ideal source of potential resources. They are designed to provide housing, food, basic medical care, study space, and athletic facilities in one centralized location.
Major conferences have already announced they will be playing conference only schedules. Schools would still want to save face and show they aren’t only prioritizing the revenue sports (even though football and basketball are the only real priorities for 99% of programs). Since almost every conference has between 8 and 12 members with only 6 NCAA fall sports, conferences could select bubble campuses for each sport.
Universities with the best facilities for the highest revenue sports would obviously be the higher priorities to house the coaching staffs and players for every school in the conference. It would bring in revenues for schools while allowing them them to experiment for when entire student bodies return to campus. Furthermore, if a fall sports season occurred without a hitch, it’s easier to see full-scale returns to campus in the spring.
Schools have every reason to try and pull this off. College athletes are the ideal crash-test dummies in the twisted world they exist. It still won’t be safe for coaches, athletes, or other employees, but college sports are built on brainwashing.
Football teams have already begun voluntary workouts and student-athletes have flooded back to campus even during outbreaks. The responsibility will fall on fans and player advocates to control their own desire to see sports.
Wanting to see our favorite schools take on a rival or vie for a national championship cannot come before the safety of the athletes. Yet we’ve already accepted that. Sure, maybe not on the scale of a pandemic, but how else do we justify college athletes sustaining life-altering injuries without compensation?
The risks are astronomically higher right now, but they were always too high to justify the current system’s existence. If we’re not okay exposing unpaid “student”-athletes to COVID-19, then why are we okay exposing them to CTE? If we’re okay doing either, it’s hard to claim we care about the athletes at all.
Expect the calls to come from coaches soon. They will ask their institutions to announce online instruction and isolate their athletes from the outside world. They will call it an opportunity for normalcy. They won’t be wrong. Exploiting college athletes is the American normal. Maybe now it’ll be blatant enough for something to stop it.
