Seth Emerson did a pretty neat thing yesterday ($$), posting a Q&A with a Georgia fan who’s struggling with how the coronavirus has affected him and his family. The part that struck a chord with me was when Seth turned the conversation around and asked this question:
What are your thoughts on sports coming back?
“I think about it. We’re season-ticket holders. And to be honest with you we only went to one game last year (he has a small child and his wife was pregnant). But we would usually tailgate and that kind of thing, for the social aspect of it. We always love getting to Athens. It’s one of our favorite places to be. But you know, the thought of sitting around people that close again, I’m just not sure if I’m prepared for that yet. Who knows if you can get this again. Do I want to go through another two weeks of this quarantining again? No. Is it worth going to a football game? Not really. Do I love going to a football game? Yes. It’s a lot of fun.
“The other side of that is you hear about will they play games with people not in the stands. Can you imagine a third down on defense with nobody there? How weird would that be? I just don’t think that’s a good look too. Even for baseball it’s not a good look. I know they say they just want to play, they don’t care if people are there or not. I don’t know. I have a hard time picturing it.”
Just like him, I want to believe things are okay when they invite us back, but in the absence of a vaccine, do I really want to take that leap with 92000 of my closest friends? That’s a really tough sell for me, I’m afraid.
But if they’re really able to protect the players — and I mean really — could I watch broadcasts of games without fans? My guess is yes, for the simple reason that I could use the distraction.
Where do y’all fit in?
Get The Picture 
Shiiiiiiit man, I watched the Sugar Bowl for the second time in a week yesterday evening on insidious ESPN. Of course I’d watch a game without fans.
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If we are invited back to attend sporting events, I plan to be in my seats, period.
I’ve said it multiple times, if it isn’t safe for students to attend classes, it isn’t safe for players to play. If fans aren’t allowed to attend, I won’t watch.
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I don’t think it is so black and white. We can’t stay in lockdown forever, but we will probably have to keep some limitations in place until we have an effective treatment/vaccine or an extremely robust system for testing and contract tracing.
I can easily imagine a situation in the fall where the University is open, research labs are up and running, etc., but most classes are still being held online (because they can be). It might be reasonable to have sports without crowds in that situation.
Big sporting events with crowds will probably be the last thing to come back online. In addition to putting large numbers of people in close proximity, they bring people from all over the country and the world. I live in Europe, for example, but I get back to Athens for at least one game most every year. That’s basically the worst case scenario for managing an epidemic.
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It is black and white for me. If it isn’t safe for my daughter to attend classes in person, it isn’t safe for any undergraduate student to be on campus. If you want to support keeping 100+ guys in lockdown for 6 days a week so you can watch them play, that’s your prerogative. I can’t bring myself to do it.
If fans are not permitted to attend, I am not watching. If you want to watch, good for you, but I have zero interest. I’ll read the Senator’s weekly Observations from the Armchair instead and watch a few highlights after the game.
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It’s not a binary question of safe/not safe, though. It’s about balancing overall risk to the population with the benefits of specific activities to the participants or to society at large.
If there are not students on campus in the Fall, then I agree there will be no football. But, you may well have a phase where, for example, grad students in research fields are in the lab doing their work, and laboratory courses are meeting in person (because they need to), but most lectures are still being held online (because they can be). Why would you pack 400 students in a crowded lecture hall if it is not strictly necessary?
The same logic could well apply to sports. I imagine you could play a bare bones game in Sanford with less than 500 people total in the stadium. And it is conceivable that every one of those people would have been tested for Covid-19 the day before. That’s a huge difference in risk from a normal game with 93k fans coming together from all over the world. It’s not hard to imagine reaching a point in the crisis where the first scenario is reasonable, but the second is not.
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The question is not about safe/not safe. It’s about whether I will be willing to sit down for 4 hours and watch a football game with no fans in the stands. If unpaid student-athletes are put into mandatory quarantine for 6 days a week, so they can come out and entertain us from our couches and HDTVs for 3 1/2 hours on a Saturday, that sounds a whole lot like the gladiators in ancient Rome (without the fights to the death, of course). I’m not going to watch that. I would rather work on my golf game or spend those Saturdays doing other things with my family.
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Yeah, the players wouldn’t be in quarantine, though. The scenario I am trying (and I guess failing) to describe, is one in which the country is more or less returning to normal activity except that public events with large crowds are still deemed too high risk. That is actually a pretty likely scenario.
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Taking class in a virtual environment
Spending days in the football building
Going to their place of residence
Having their temperature taken multiple times per day
Being forced not to interact with anyone outside the football program
It may not be quarantine, but it sure sounds like it.
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Yeah, if they are forced not to interact with anyone outside the program that would be quarantine. But, again, that’s not what I am describing.
Fairly likely we would still be having most classes online just because that is relatively easy to do.
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CZM, if you don’t think the control freaks that are Power 5 head football coaches are going to allow the 100+ student-athletes under their control interact with the outside world, I have some oceanfront property in Hahira to sell you.
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I’d definitely watch a game without fans. It’d be like watching one of your favorite music artists — one with a raucous fan base — play a “Tiny Desk Concert” or one of those radio-studio shows where they’re just in a soundbooth. Different but still cool. I wonder if bettors would quit giving teams a home field edge?
I’d be in favor of letting the Redcoat Band be there. Just make them all sit six feet apart. And whoever manages the between-down lights and music could really get jiggy with it.
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For the past decade or so I’ve watched more football on TV than live so yes I’d watch but only if the safety of all involved was legitimate.
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One of The J. Reid’s Parker Director of Athletics’ biggest nightmares. Regular folks may demand more attention to their overall game day experience before deciding that going into crowds is worth i.
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On average, I’ve only attended one Georgia game in-person every few years, and most of them weren’t in Athens. I was toying with the idea of attending the UGA/Bama game this year, but I also have a small child at home and I’m not sure I’ve stocked up enough brownie points with my wife to allow for that trip. So as someone who watches the vast majority of UGA games on TV anyway, I’d be watching even if there are no fans in attendance.
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If the stadium gates are open we will be in our seats.
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I don’t think a vaccine will suddenly make it “safe” to go out in public. We have a flu vaccine and it doesn’t grant you immunity from the flu; it just improves your chances and 80,000 people still die in a bad flu season. 40,000 a year die in traffic accidents. That’s 120,000 people a year who could be saved if we all never left our homes again.
I have also read a few reports speculating that there is a large number of people who got COVID-19 and never felt symptoms. If that is true, then the virus is less lethal than what we currently know. Unfortunately we only have the capability to test sick people at the moment, but they will begin studying the healthy soon and we should have a better idea of the risks.
If it turns out that COVID-19 is no more deadly than the flu, that many people have already developed natural antibodies to fight it, and that most people who contract the virus have little to no symptoms, of course I would go back to watch games live with or without a vaccine. Admittedly, the if is doing a lot of work here, as the Senator likes to say.
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Flu evolves new strains very quickly, so that we are always playing catch up with our vaccines. But that is sort of a special case. We have Measles and Polio vaccines, and nobody is getting those diseases except the children of idiots who are anti-vaccination. Researchers currently think we will be able to make an effective one-off vaccine for Covid-19.
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Well, I’m still planning a mission trip in June, on a plane full of strangers to a country full of strangers with massively inferior health care facilities.
So yeah, I’d watch a game in person.
At some point in time you have to make peace with your own mortality and move on. I have no desire to live forever, I just want to live while I’m alive.
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Andy Dufresne said it this way:
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TN, don’t take my Shawshank reference as anything but support for your stance. Live well.
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I took exactly how you intended!
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I haven’t seen anyone discuss this yet but can Georgia or any other college football team afford to play a season without the gate? Or the concessions? Are we dis cussing something that teams would never do because it isn’t economically feasible?
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That’s why I’ve suggested CFB may seriously entertain an 8-team playoff this season, to make up for lost revenue.
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Had felt we would see CFB this year, probably with no fans, or some serious limitations on how many fans/family could attend. And yes, most of us would watch even though it would be seriously weird. After the past week of listening to what requirements/expectations many citizens have regarding safety, I am questioning 2021 now. It is never going to be safe enough to guarantee everything I am hearing people express. Developing, testing, and producing a vaccine is a 2 year process, if things go well. Some folks will never be comfortable with crowds of strangers for years if ever. Not judging, just an opinion of what I am hearing from a majority. Some of that is hyperbole and will diminish, others are people who are dug into their positions.
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Baby steps, Mac. Going from zero to ninety thousand in one fell swoop may be too tough for some, but maybe if we get to acclimate ourselves first in smaller settings, like restaurants and movie theaters, it gets easier to accept ramping up.
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Digging into some specifics Senator, the game most at risk would be the WLOCP. Both teams play in JAX because that City subsidizes the game. Would the City of Jacksonville pay the Gators and the Dawgs to play there if no fans could attend the game and consequently nobody would show up in town to spend money there?
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Good question.
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The same question exists for the neutral site game at Mercedes Benz stadium. Can the organizers pay the Dawgs and the Cavs to play if there is no gate or concessions?
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Honestly, if they aren’t ready to start the season on time, that one’s a moot question.
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I would suspect the answer to that question is yes (probably for a lower fee) because Jacksonville wouldn’t want to lose the game when fans are allowed to return to games.
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In general, I think you are right, but overall I do think some will be changed forever. For some it will be mixing with strangers, some will not allow certain touches like handshakes, pat on the backs, high fives, etc., others (both employers and employees) will expand the work from home philosophy, or sending people to business meetings/conferences, versus video conferencing. This can go on and on, each reverberating throughout our culture.
Most of these will take place in baby steps; they also can have a profound way this society interacts with one another, or spends their money, or even where they live. When you look at the “hot spots”, you wonder how long some will tolerate living on top of one another in big cities. The next pandemic doesn’t have to be 100 years away, especially if you can choose where you live and do your job as well. I just think the psyche has been changed when so many people saw how vulnerable they really were.
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What’s the song about someday never coming? What if a vaccine is never developed? Lots of empty seats forever? Right now, I doubt I could make myself stay home come September. No UGA baseball to attend is already killing me.
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Herd immunity BI. We would develop it after awhile.
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Well South Korea now has nearly 100 patients who tested positive, recovered, tested. negative on at least two occasions and who now test positive again. So immunity is still up in the air. We’ll see how this plays out.
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All of those in a vulnerable position, for any one of several reasons, could consider that a death sentence. It would be just a matter of time as the virus continued to circulate. There has to be immunity or we are up schitt’s creek.
I have read of those who claim a 2nd infection with great interest hoping this isn’t true. What if they got a “bad” test in those early days? What if they had a false positive and were having similar symptoms so no one questioned the results. I assume they were re-tested when the results came back positive after their recovery because there is a whole lot riding on how this does play out.
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I’d go to a game tomorrow, with all of y’all and 92k more.
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Who’s this “y’all” you refer to? 😉
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I’ll go if the guy in front of me who takes up two seats leaves his sweat rag at home that he loves to throw over his shoulder toward me after wiping himself down.
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You need to request a move.
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That’s disgusting. You can actually text that at the stadium and ask for relief.
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As bad as the CCP Virus is, I’m still trying to wrap my head around why the reaction is so dramatically different from 2009/2010 when the H1N1 pandemic was killing millions of people.
I don’t pretend to have an answer, I’m just hoping for two things… 1. A vaccine is developed in 2021. 2. Trend lines start going down soon.
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I’ve been asking that very question myself DB. My conclusion is that the media hyped this way more than they did the H1N1 and the politicians felt they had to do something this time. The bigger question IMHO is what happens next time?
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An industry starving to death for lack of eyeballs and clicks would have a strong profit-motive to scare the shit out of everyone and keep us indoors. I could buy that theory, but we don’t have enough data to know how deadly/contagious the virus is. It would also not be unreasonable of the media to pump up the intensity of this. It’s a new disease and there was youtube footage of China literally welding people into their homes.
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H1N1 didn’t kill millions of people, for starters.
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Umm….neither has….eh, screw it.
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H1N1 didn’t kill millions of people.
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Don’t underestimate the special effects wizards. I’m sure they can make background noise seem real. The Falcons were fined for piped-in fan noise just a season or so ago.
TV shows have had canned laughter almost since the beginning. We could mic-up Mullen, Leach, Kiffie, and Gus and have a canned audience guffawing at their playcalling…
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Sadly, I don’t see this season happening. Start with the team. Even if tested and healthy there are hundreds of support personnel needed to open the stadium and broadcast the event even without fans. Suppose you get over that logistics hurdle, what if an outbreak occurs on the opposing team a few days before the game? If a vaccine were developed in July you’d still be months away from sufficient manufacturing and distribution to make things work for a low priority need like sporting events. Let’s just hope and pray we can slowly and safely start reopening small businesses and get that vaccination rolled out by year end. If so, 2021 will be a great year.
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I could handle it if we had the 2010 team or the 2015 team coming in, I could handle having the season skipped or canceled.
But dammit, this team we’ve got coming in this year is going to be amazing to watch and it’s got a shot at a title. I’ll go sit in the stands and watch them with a face mask, gloves, whatever it takes.
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Everyone is just speculating at this point but my take is that mass gatherings (which obviously includes fan attendance at professional and college sporting events) will not resume until one of two things happens:
a vaccine is widely available and used
we develop natural immunity to the virus over time thru contracting it and building up the necessary immune response to it
Both of those are long, tough roads. However, it’s more likely that the vaccine happens first. With that said, it’s also likely that it will not be widely available and used in 2020 (which currently has about 8 1/2 months left). And it could easily be deep into 2021 before it is.
So regardless of whether there’s a 2020-21 college football season or not, my take is that fans will not be able to attend.
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Sorry, the wordpress editor removed bullet point formatting that I included to make the two possibilities more readable. Here they are separated…
a vaccine is widely available and used
OR we develop natural immunity to the virus over time thru contracting it and building up the necessary immune response to it
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I watched a couple SerieA games from Italy with no fans. It was actually kind of intriguing and interesting, but perhaps the novelty would have worn off. I liked it though.
If Rinaldo, who made more money in the last decade than Lebron, can play without fans, so can college football players (safety issues notwithstanding).
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Sure, they can play without fans.
Sure, I can decide not to watch.
I think if they play college games without fans, we can officially dispose of the amateurism romantic’s point of view of playing for old State U.
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That’s fine. I’m just saying the idea that it won’t work or be some sort of disaster of a product without fans leaves me puzzled. There are cool things you can do with it…..mic up this person, etc etc. The field noise is really cool.
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So, you’re saying you wouldn’t watch without fans?
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Yep.
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“I think if they play college games without fans, we can officially dispose of the amateurism romantic’s point of view of playing for old State U”
How so?
Wouldn’t students at a University playing a game with no fans in the stands be the very definition of playing for old State U?
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if there are games i will be in my seat happily cheering the Dawgs.
for those that have compromised health or are older, I hope you enjoy the view on your HDTV, better food and not waiting in line to take a leak.
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Agreed. I’ll be there with you.
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If stadium is open I’m there. But I’ll bet it will be around a different set of people. A lot off season ticket holders are not renewing with this going on.
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If unemployment comes anywhere near the 30%+ some are forecasting, McGarity may have to throw in hot dogs and Cokes to the season ticket packages.
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“if they’re really able to protect the players — and I mean really”
this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^ this^
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If they’re playing, I’ll be there. Bonus: Should be more affordable.
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