If you’re trying to understand the thinking of people who work for NCAA-member institutions amidst this pandemic, Ohio State University athletic director Gene Smith recently did you a solid. Smith laid out what people in his position are telling themselves so they can sleep at night while they’re not just exploiting the labor of campus athletic workers but literally putting them at greater risk of contracting a virus that will likely have killed half a million people in this country alone at some point this year.
Smith is by no means alone in his prioritizing revenue over lives, as recent events at Florida and Michigan have demonstrated. It’s all a snapshot of how the college sports industry has defiled higher education.
Smith: athlete-employees contracting COVID-19 is “nothing major”
Recently, Smith gave an interview to Joey Kaufman of Buckeyextra. When asked to provide a snapshot of how healthy and safe the American football team was able to be throughout the season, Smith’s response was:
“Pretty good. We didn’t have any major problems until (the Illinois game). We had positives, but nothing major. So that game, we had a spike. And you saw on the field in the games after that who was missing. That game was our biggest challenge. But we were able to get it back to some normalcy. Using the word normal is not a good one because nothing was normal, but we got it back to a manageable way to handle things. That game, that week, was the one that was most problematic.”
Never mind that researchers at the same “school” that Smith works for determined that nearly a third of campus athletic workers have heart damage linked to COVID-19. It’s no big deal, Smith assures us.
Smith’s double-talk throughout the interview on the subject of athlete-employee safety is bewildering but unsurprising. He spoke like the Big Ten’s “wiffle ball” instead of bubble approach was somehow sufficient to prevent viral transmission while he admits athlete-employees did test positive but wouldn’t even give a ballpark figure of a percentage of campus athletic workers who tested positive.
It reads like someone who, like the NCAA, is only concerned with maximizing revenue while minimizing accountability for himself. As previously mentioned, Smith is not alone in that.
Michigan’s response to the state government discovering a backbone
Over the weekend, the Michigan Health Dept. forced the University of Michigan to pause all athletic department activities for at least two weeks. After The Michigan Daily broke the news of the health department’s intervention, the athletic department tried to twist the narrative to make it look like it had triggered the work stoppage voluntarily.
The facts don’t line up with Manuel’s spin. The truth is that 22 campus athletic workers at Michigan had tested positive over the last week, adding to the nine athlete-employees who tested positive the week before. The men’s basketball team still played its game at Purdue last Friday, even though a member of the Boilermakers’ men’s basketball team tested positive that same day. The reality is that if not for the intervention of the state, Michigan would have continued its athletic programs.
The blatant disregard for human lives isn’t isolated to just athletics activities at these institutions. For decades, it has seeped into the entire structures of these campuses. Recent events at Florida act as further, harrowing proof.
Florida’s “tattle buttons”
If you want all the details on how one NCAA-member institution’s lust for money has wrecked the lives of all of its faculty, staff, and students, this is the thread that will clue you in.
Major points from the thread include:
Students only need to get tested, not produce negative results, to be eligible to attend classes in-person
Administration threatened faculty and staff with disciplinary measures if they tried to shift instruction online
Administration created a “tattle button” on the app for students, encouraging them to report faculty and staff who deviated from the university’s push for in-person instruction
The university has put the onus of policing students’ compliance with safety protocols on faculty and staff, including making sure they’ve been tested recently, which can only be done in-person, thereby risking exposure
This is the state of higher education in our country. These horrendous circumstances have been building for decades, as the exploitation of labor and the debasement of life in the college sports industry has made them more visible. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further exposed the kleptocratic greed that was somewhat able to mask its presence before the virus broke out.
In my latest podcast, Kelsey Trainor and I discuss the moral conundrum of women’s basketball at these institutions, among other things. It’d be super rad if you gave it a listen, and a share.
You’ve been great. Enjoy this video about a fast food-gaming crossover.