The numbers just don’t add up — COVID-19 has a full 2020 college football season in jeopardy

Will college football stadiums, like Utah’s Rice-Eccles Stadium is Salt Lake City, sit empty this season because of COVID-19? | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — There has been hopeful talk about holding the 2020 college football season in some form, but, let’s face it, the sport has one obvious strike against it. In case you forgot, here’s a hint:

FOOTBALL IS A CONTACT SPORT.

There’s no social distancing in football, unless you tackle like Deion Sanders (“It’s a business decision”).

When health officials are telling you to stand 6 feet apart and stores are placing STAND HERE signs on the floor and cashiers are behind plastic shields and there are one-way aisles at the grocery store and shaking hands is forbidden and people are wearing masks even when they’re jogging, how are we still talking about a college football season? How are young men supposed to block and tackle and social distance? The hands-to-the-face penalty will be a shower and a quarantine.

When the country began shutting down businesses last winter and in-season sports abandoned play because of the virus, few thought the college football season would suffer the same fate; at least there was that. But now, all bets are off, or should be.

Brett McMurphy, one of the premier college football reporters in the country, reported the results of his own research two months ago and discovered that 99% of college football ADs believed there would be a season. But much has changed since then.

Since the NCAA lifted its ban of on-campus activities July 1, schools have begun to hold voluntary workouts on campus for various sports, and the results are not encouraging.

Grand Canyon University has placed its entire basketball team in quarantine after players tested positive for the coronavirus. They’ll spend two weeks locked up together in what promises to be just a little bit more team bonding than anyone wants.

Five PGA Tour golfers withdrew from the Travelers Championship last week because of the virus.

About one-third of all NFL teams have had at least one player test positive, including Cowboys star running back Ezekiel Elliott.

The Philadelphia Phillies shut down their spring complex when five players tested positive.

The NBA, which is still planning to hold a truncated season, reported last week that 16 players out of the 302 tested produced positive tests.

No one should be surprised that many college football teams have been hit by positive tests resulting from voluntary workouts. Eight Alabama players have tested positive. Ditto for three players at Auburn. Boise State shut down voluntary workouts because of the coronavirus. Eight days after Central Florida football players returned to campus, three of them tested positive. Ten days after Tennessee brought players to campus for workouts, 13 tested positive. Clemson reported that the majority of the 28 athletes who tested positive for the virus were football players. Kansas State suspended voluntary football workouts after 14 members of the athletic department tested positive.

If schools are having this much difficulty with small off-season workouts, is there reason to think the season wouldn’t be worse? Football camp would mean more than 100 players gathered from around the country, more full-scale practices, crowded locker rooms, weightlifting sessions in confined quarters, more contact on the field. Imagine the challenge of road trips, with players, coaches and staff traveling by bus and airplanes and staying in hotels.

It will be a vast undertaking and a new way of life in athletics, with masks, gloves, hand sanitizers everywhere, social distancing, temperatures taken at the door, no hugging, high-fives, sanitized facilities, widely spaced weight racks.

Ross D. Franklin, AP

In this Nov. 17, 2012, file photo, an Arizona State fan is all alone in the upper deck during an NCAA college football game against Washington State, in Tempe, Ariz. Will the stands be empty if there is a full college football season this fall, or will COVID-19 force alternations to the schedule like it has already done to other sports?

More than 40 universities have reported breakouts of the virus this summer, and those are just the schools that have decided to report test results. Such reporting will be essential during the season in the interest of containment, but some wonder if that will happen. One athletic director told CBS Sports that last fall a big-time football program flew to a road game with “a plane full” of players infected with the flu.

“We didn’t tell (the opponent) who all was sick and who wasn’t,” the AD of that school said. “You just don’t do that. I don’t even know if we put it out there (publicly) … I don’t know if there is anything morally compelling to make us have to do that. Not playing people you know to be sick is the morally compelling part of it.”

The Associated Press contacted 66 FBS schools this month to ask if they would report how many of their players test positive. Half of them said no.

The college football season — if it happens — is almost guaranteed to be a vastly different experience in the stadium. Major League Baseball is planning to have a truncated 60-game season without fans in the stadium. During the seventh-inning stretch, fans watching on TV can sing that old favorite, “Take Me Out of the Ballgame.” College football likely will adopt similar protocols that would eliminate or reduce the number of fans in attendance. Even if fans were allowed into the stadium, how many of them would do it?

The upcoming season is highly problematic. Yahoo interviewed three Power Five coaches and all of them were pessimistic. “I have no idea how we play,” one of those coaches told Yahoo. “We are cleared to have 10 guys work out at a time with no one within 10 feet of each other and have to clean the whole weight room. And two weeks later, we can line up in a walk (through) 11 on 11?”

Added another Power Five coach: “If it’s contact (training) and (we) lose a guy for 14 days, I don’t know how we’re going to have a football season.”

The third Power Five coach said the chances of having a complete 12-game season without “significant cancellations and chaos” as “close to zero” percent.

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