How to be a football coach and not make this worse

Coaches don't need to be our pandemic heroes. They just need to avoid actively getting in the way.

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That there is anything to say about how football coaches have handled the pandemic is a sign of how much has already gone wrong. 

Through decades of showering these coaches with money and putting the hopes and dreams of entire states on their backs, we have made coaches into something between regional statesmen and religious icons. That has occurred even though a coach’s area of expertise has not expanded beyond “running a football team.” If a 100-hour-a-week coach fits much more into his life, that is a feat of time management. 

The bare minimum we might expect of any public figure right now is to repeat the basic advice of public health experts. Some coaches have done that, reading their cards effectively and not making things worse. In the summer, Kirby Smart went on TV and told people to wear masks. Smart is not the governor of Georgia and cannot galvanize the state to do much more than support the Dawgs, but it was nice. It was also more or less the peak of what a coach’s positive contribution is likely to be, given that almost all of their lives are devoted to winning football games at any cost. 

When a coach does anything at this point in the pandemic, the best we can reasonably hope for as it relates to public health is a draw: Don’t make it worse. The upside for coach behavior during a pandemic is slightly above zero. 

The play sheet here is not complicated. 

1. Don’t try to force things that might get people killed.

If most public health professionals recommend one thing, do not use your media appearances to suggest the opposite thing. 

For instance, the experts do not advise getting the coronavirus. People die from it. Most people don’t, but even otherwise healthy people might experience complications or spread it, and there is naturally a lot of uncertainty about a new virus. So if you are a coach, do not agitate for young people to get the virus in the name of the economy: 

“In my opinion, we need to bring our players back. They are 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22-years old and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off. If that is true, then we sequester them, and continue because we need to run money through the state of Oklahoma.”

Some schools are now letting thousands of people into stadiums to watch those players. Schools generally cap crowds somewhere around 25% of the venue’s usual capacity. So if you’re a coach, and you lose a road game in front of 25,000 people in a 110,000-seat building, please do not get in front of cameras 10 minutes later and say: 

“Hopefully, the UF administration decides to let us pack the Swamp against LSU — 100% — because that crowd was certainly a factor in the game.” 

When you do eventually apologize for that idea (you’ll have to), don’t claim you didn’t mean what you meant and say sorry if anyone was offended. 

Especially don’t do any of that if it turns out your team has a handful of COVID cases and needs to shut down within three days of your insistence that your university must allow you to have 88,000 people gathering in close quarters in the middle of an uncontrolled global pandemic. 

I’s not a coach’s fault if a governor with an indifference to human life wants to pretend said pandemic isn’t happening. Just don’t make it worse.

2. Don’t be cagey about whether your team has COVID cases. 

If your team has a cluster of cases, do not hide that information from the public. 

Your team exists on a college campus. Even if your players are in something resembling a bubble, they might come into contact with other students, university staff, and local residents, all who would benefit from knowing if they might have been exposed to a person spending time in a football facility that has COVID spreading through it. 

So don’t be like the half of Power 5 teams who don’t answer when news outlets ask about their case counts. 

Don’t hide your case numbers because you don't want to be at a “competitive disadvantage” against Bobby Petrino’s FCS team. And if you’re going to take that path, don’t then admit you did tell your opponent your case counts without having a good reason for withholding that information from your own community. 

Don’t keep your case information to yourself until minutes before kickoff every week, because heaven forbid NC State might find out you’re thin at DB. 

And please don’t hide behind privacy laws HIPAA or FERPA to avoid sharing aggregate numbers. You are not convincing anybody. 

3. Wear your mask. On your face. 

The coach pictured above makes $7.5 million per year to finish fourth or so in his division. Sadly, it’s not enough to afford a mask comfortable enough to keep over his mouth and nose while close-talking into his QB’s exposed face while facing off against a team that will, just a few days later, have multiple players test positive. Maybe #9 can loan his coach some money so the coach can afford a $12 Costco box of 50 disposables. 

Watch any game this fall, and you’ll find coaches who sometimes wear their masks on their faces and other times use them as neck warmers or chinstraps or ear covers. 

None of this should be hard. In fact, it should be a reprieve. 

Football coaches are used to facing expectations they’ll never meet, pretending they’ll meet them, and collecting buyouts after it’s widely understood that they won’t. Here, coaches are being graded on the curve to end all curves. 

Nobody is even trying to hold them responsible for the basic fact of this season’s existence, even though it’s entirely possible this season has already contributed to the virus’ spread (and outside deaths) in ways programs couldn’t even know. (COVID is the worst possible match for college sports, because thanks to the NCAA’s decentralized setup, it’s never any one person’s fault when something bad happens, and assigning individual blame is often impossible.) 

All we can ask is that coaches don’t go out of their way to make a year from hell even worse. 

If you’re the coach at, say, Nebraska, that is a gift. For a change, you have an expectation you could realistically meet.