"Great News: BIG TEN FOOTBALL IS BACK," Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday, immediately after university officials voted unanimously to start in-conference play next month. Earlier this month, Trump had plugged making a phone call to Big 10 commissioner Kevin Warren on twitter. Now he was keen to take credit for the turnaround of beloved football programs that run through several critical battleground states, including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. "Have a FANTASTIC SEASON! It is my great honor to have helped!!!"
Big Ten football officials may have made a winning argument for how to protect players in their programs from widespread coronavirus outbreaks, but that's cold comfort to local officials in the cities that serve as home to their massive college campuses. After word dropped that the league's chancellors and presidents had reneged on their August decision prohibiting play, local health officials and politicians openly worried about what the reversal would mean for community spread beyond the teams themselves.
“While we all love our football Saturdays, the festivities that come with them are going to serve as new spreading events within our community,” County Executive Joe Parisi of Dane County, Wisconsin, said in a statement, according to The New York Times. Madison is both the state capital and home to the University of Wisconsin.
Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway seconded the sentiment, saying: “The increase in cases we are seeing is predominantly due to parties. Adding football parties into this mix is only going to make the situation worse.”
But the harshest rebuke came from the director of the public health department for Madison and Dane County, Janel Heinrich. “We value people’s health and lives over sports, and we hope that UW does as well," she said.
The stadium games will not include fans, and the teams have laid out strict guidelines for preventing and stymying outbreaks. Participants in the football programs will undergo daily testing, players who test positive will be banned from playing for 21 days, and if an outbreak within a team reaches a certain threshold, they must stop practicing. But none of that addresses testing or preventative measures for other students on campus who have already been fueling outbreaks even without the addition of rowdy football parties.
Madison, in particular, has been fighting a massive campus outbreak, with more than a third of the students living in dorms and more than half of the fraternity and sorority houses near campus under quarantine. University of Michigan recently confirmed a cluster of 19 cases in one of the major campus dorms.
Linda Vail, the health officer for Ingham County, Michigan, where Michigan State University is located, added that beyond students, the greater community also wouldn't get any of the protections afforded to the programs themselves.
"The Big Ten has come up with an excellent, safe plan for the actual football game, for the athletes, for the coaches,” she told the Times. But the county's coronavirus infection rate has already soared with students' return to campus. “Fans or no fans, at this moment we’re not in a position to be able to have football games."
One Purdue history professor resigned from her athletic affairs post after being cut out of the process and only later learned of the reversal from ESPN commentators. “By restarting the fall season, Purdue University has opened the door for approximately 600 Boilermakers to be excused from the social distancing protocols of the Purdue Pledge,” Professor Stacy Holden wrote in a statement, referring to guidelines that had been set up for reopening the West Lafayette, Indiana campus.
Holden wasn't the only one caught off guard by the decision. Health officials across the conference had spent over a month relaxing into the idea that they wouldn't be faced with the toxic mix of student parties fueled by football games, the flu season, and the ongoing coronavirus. “We have to start strategizing,” Vail said, “right now.”
As usual, after Trump spikes the ball on a supposed big win, everyone else is left cleaning up the mess. In this case, that means trying to save lives.