Big 12 commissioner’s simple message to league’s student-athletes: Get vaccinated
First out of the gate for college football media days among major conferences is the Big 12. A year after the event was shelved because of the COVID-19 pandemic, coaches, athletes and administrators finally got to talk about football ... and the coronavirus.
Wednesday’s chatter involved the virus that everyone had hoped would be well on the way to eradication by now. The rapidly emerging Delta variant hasn’t dampened optimism about the upcoming season, but it’s certainly factoring into most conversations here this week.
Like the one commissioner Bob Bowlsby recently had with his fellow league commissioners. The topic? Testing protocols.
“I don’t know if I ever introduced a topic that was less warmly received,” Bowlsby said. “And yet with the variant there are good reasons why we need to be vigilant, and we will be.”
The Delta variant now accounts for more than half of all new COVID-19 cases in the U.S., according to The New York Times, and is surging in areas with lower vaccination rates. Of the five states that include the 10 schools in the Big 12, only Iowa, with 48.7 percent of its population fully vaccinated, exceeds the national average of 48 percent.
Still, all signs point to college football in 2021 looking more like 2019 than 2020’s chaos, when schedules were constructed on the fly, fans were largely denied attendance — playing havoc with athletic department budgets — and player opt-outs were common.
“It was emotionally taxing,” Bowlsby said. “It was a long year, and frankly I’m exhausted. I wasn’t excited about revisiting protocols for this fall ... I think if you’re honest with yourself you say you wish you were done with it, but we’re not quite done with it.”
Be that as it may, schools say they are done limiting attendance. Ticket campaigns with every seat available are well underway, including for the Big 12 championship game. Those went on sale Wednesday.
What’s not happening is a league-wide vaccine mandate for team personnel and players. The conference can’t require it. Universities can, however, and many smaller, private schools — Rockhurst and William Jewell, to name a couple — have done so.
The list includes no Big 12 schools.
Kansas State football coach Chris Klieman said his team is “just under 80%” fully vaccinated.
“We’ve pushed and a lot of kids have been vaccinated,” Klieman said. “Now, we’ll see what happens when we get into the fall. ... Right now, we have pretty normal activities going on.”
That in itself is quite unlike the pre-vaccine 2020 season, when testing, mask-wearing and social-distancing were the primary directives. Klieman talked about a player getting pulled off the field upon the result of a positive test result — teammates who’d had dinner with him the previous night feared they’d be next to contract the virus.
Iowa State coach Matt Campbell said his program relied on the strength of the Cyclones’ locker room to get through a season in which the program appeared in the Big 12 championship game for the first time.
“The greatest challenge that you dealt with was in your locker room, and were you willing to commit to the standard — not just the three hours you were involved with football, but the other 21 hours you were away from the facility,” Campbell said. “I think the greatest thing we learned, and I’ve always believed, is when you have player-driven leadership, when the players in the locker room say this is the standard, this is how we are doing things and this is the expectation, then you can get through anything.”
College football also has plenty of topics to consider that don’t involve a virus: major movements in player benefits generated by name, image and likeness opportunities; the transfer portal; proposed expansion of the football playoff; and more.
Bowlsby was asked Wednesday to rank these things in order of importance. He offered no such order, speaking instead about the disorder that will follow if vaccinations are refused.
“Frankly, anyone not getting vaccinated is taking unnecessary and unwarranted risks,” he said. “It’s shortsighted to not get vaccinated.
“If indeed the Delta variant is as infectious as it is reported to be, not getting vaccinated is rolling the dice. As student athletes, you’re also rolling the dice on whether you’re going to participate.”