We sure these sellout crowds are a good idea?
At Virginia Tech last Friday, the packed crowd bounced to “Enter Sandman.” At the University of Wisconsin the next day, fans jumped around to “Jump Around.”
College football and its crowd traditions are back to their full glory like they were in 2019, before Covid-19 restrictions sharply limited fan attendance in 2020.
Some of the country’s biggest powerhouses — including Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State and Oklahoma, to name a few — are hosting games to full capacity on Saturday. And fans who attend these games won’t have to prove their vaccination status, won’t be required to social distance and won’t have to wear masks in their seats.
The return of college football and its unique cultures, which began in earnest last week, are a source of communal bonding for sports fans, yet they also represent a source of anxiety for others.
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Both the SEC and NCAA deferred to schools to make their own decisions — based on local and state requirements — when asked what each was doing to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 at football games. Both do have Covid-19 protocols for student-athletes.
“My ask of our fans is to try to take advantage of what science has done,” Greg Sankey, SEC commissioner, said last month.
Georgia’s plan to host such a large crowd comes as the state has fully vaccinated about half of its residents 12 and older, one of the 10 lowest vaccination rates among all states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Athens-Clarke County, where the Bulldogs play, has a “high” rate of Covid-19 community transmission, the CDC says.
Last week marked the full opening of the college football season, and stadiums across the country were packed with fans eager to rejoin the communal sports experience.
In Georgia, the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta hosted nearly 72,000 fans for an Alabama-Miami game on Saturday and hosted about 31,000 fans for the Louisville-Ole Miss game on Monday. At both games, the stadium roof was open and masks were required in enclosed spaces but not in open-air areas, and there were no vaccine requirements.
A number of the universities that have packed fans into seats this season require students to be vaccinated, including at large Big Ten schools Michigan (109,000 in attendance), Maryland (44,000) and Illinois (41,000).
These schools are hardly breaking new ground by holding packed games. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball have similarly held full capacity events this summer, and the National Football League will do so when the season begins later this week.
This story was published Saturday morning, before this week’s games were played. Those other sports aren’t a great comparison because they have smaller crowds and their gamedays aren’t all-day party affairs. The SEC and some other conferences put an emphasis on getting players and coaches vaccinated, but getting fans vaccinated is not on their agenda. I can hardly blame them, because I can imagine the pushback they’d get if they tried. There’s evidence to suggest that limited-seating football games did not help spread COVID, but we are not doing limited seating any more – these are full stadia, with 80K to 100K people in attendance. Don’t be surprised if that has a negative effect.
31 day and counting……
31 days and counting………
Actually, LSU of all schools implemented a vaccine or negative test requirement to attend their home games.