Kevin Warren will never have a moment of peace. The Big Ten announced that the season would be postponed or cancelled, and a bunch of people screamed at him because they wanted their football. The Big Ten announced a return to play based on point of contact testing, and a different set of people furrowed their brows and wrote very serious takes about how this was a Dark Day. Christine Brennan went the furthest:

Note the date: 9/16/20, the day the vaunted Big Ten became the SEC. It choked. It got scared. It sold its soul for football. My @usatodaysports column on the darkest day in Big Ten history: https://t.co/uaWfgpgSqO

— Christine Brennan (@cbrennansports) September 16, 2020

This is wrong for a hundred reasons, but it is far from alone. Jemele Hill has an Atlantic piece, Pat Forde has an SI piece, and Mitch Albom has a Free Press piece that all all have more or less the same premise: the Big Ten returns to the field out of Scrooge McDuck-level greed and for no other reason.

Another common thread in discussions of the return to play on social media is that it says something about the world's misplaced priorities that football will resume when various other things, mostly schools, remain shut down. I'm not going to contest the idea that things are disastrous. This has almost nothing to do with football.

The Big Ten was correct to postpone the season; they're correct to reinstate it.

Isn't this a reversal from your previous position?

Football with daily point of contact testing is an entirely different animal than the existing regimes, as the previous post on this topic explicitly stated:

If you want to do something useful in the hopes of a spring season, advocate for the development of a protocol that uses the recently approved point-of-contact saliva test as a way to have safe football—for everyone, not just athletes—in the spring. Advocate for a nationwide testing system that will get the virus under control.

This is largely because the equation changes from the inevitability that playing football will worsen the pandemic to one where playing is pandemic-neutral.

[After THE JUMP: community spread, priorities, myocarditis]

Will playing cause more community spread?

You can certainly argue that up to this point football activities have caused community spread, including the Big Ten's. It's hard to believe that 30-40% of Wisconsin players and staff have tested positive…

As the Big Ten decides to return, 42 Wisconsin football players and staff have tested positive for COVID, officials say. https://t.co/c3JN5XEwWx

— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) September 18, 2020

…without 1) much of that transmission being intra-team and 2) intra-team transmission resulting in community transmission. The situation at various southern schools is certainly worse, with LSU and Texas Tech pursuing a herd immunity approach that certainly made local conditions worse and has likely left 10%+ of each playing roster dealing with as yet-unannounced myocarditis issues. 

That's bad. The Pac 12 really, truly shut everything down when they made the call, which now makes it difficult or impossible for them to follow the Big 10 back to competition. Bruce Feldman has a piece with various quotes from anonymous coaches and officials:

“I don’t think people know that when the seasons were postponed, the Big Ten and Pac-12 took completely different paths. They kept going like it was still training camp. They kept the same schedule like they were gonna play. We didn’t. Half of our schools couldn’t."

It is fair to say that the Big Ten's approach hasn't been as good for public health so far.

Going forward I don't think that's the case. The Big Ten's announced approach should not have community effects since COVID positive individuals will be found and isolated before they can trigger intra-team transmission. Football players will catch coronavirus by interacting with civilians and then be isolated. They will no longer catch coronavirus from teammates and then go back into the community until test results come back.

There is the possibility someone Rutgers this up—probably Rutgers—but since Big Ten football programs seem to be doing much better than universities as a whole…

…it's clear that the decision to open campuses is much worse than the one to play football.

It's not fair that football players get tests

The number of tests available to football players is not significant when applied to larger testing initiatives. Football players are 0.2% of Michigan's enrollment. There is no situation where the football players getting tests prevents a similarly wide-ranging testing program from being implemented simply because there are 500 other students for every football player.

Testing football players a lot makes sense because it is a small number of students who can undertake activities that matter to many people for various reasons. Any other group in the same situation can and should get similar testing. What is preventing them is not football but an incredible society-wide decision to be stupid assholes and not fund things like this:

#a2schoolboard Jenna Bacolor says that paying 4 dollars a week to test each student is cost prohibitive. Fails to tak into account the cost of children losing their school year, which is, um, a lot more than 4 dollars a week.

— Mister Peregrine (@PeregrineMister) September 17, 2020

The problem isn't that people care enough about football to make it work. It's that they don't seem to care about anything else.

Michigan in particular has THREE POINT NINE BILLION dollars in unrestricted endowment funds. They just do not care to use them. Michigan will only fund sufficient tests for safety when it provides a direct benefit to the bottom line. This is not a football issue; football just happens to be in the very narrow band of activities in which testing equals more money.

If that's your point, okay. The university administration has been comically inept and seems like every other band of diseased mandarins running institutions into the ground. You could fire every last one of them and I'd be fine with it. But the solution to "football players have good testing and nobody else does" is not "nobody has good testing."

What about myocarditis?

Myocarditis is likely to sideline a number of Big Ten players. The league has a mandatory 21-day sit-out period for anyone who tests positive and is going to do everything they can to monitor the heart situation of anyone who tests positive:

All COVID-19 positive student-athletes will have to undergo comprehensive cardiac testing to include labs and biomarkers, ECG, Echocardiogram and a Cardiac MRI. Following cardiac evaluation, student-athletes must receive clearance from a cardiologist designated by the university for the primary purpose of cardiac clearance for COVID-19 positive student-athletes. The earliest a student-athlete can return to game competition is 21 days following a COVID-19 positive diagnosis.

In addition to the medical protocols approved, the 14 Big Ten institutions will establish a cardiac registry in an effort to examine the effects on COVID-19 positive student-athletes. The registry and associated data will attempt to answer many of the unknowns regarding the cardiac manifestations in COVID-19 positive elite athletes.

Various people have criticized this approach as treating Big Ten football players as "guinea pigs." Many of these criticisms are bad faith idiocy, like the viral tweet guy that said this had "Tuskegee vibes" because this was going to "more-or-less intentionally infect" players, which is completely untrue.

It's still worth addressing: the Big Ten looks like it's set to hold out anyone with abnormal testing. It is explicitly promising to provide cardiac MRIs that Ohio State doctors caught asymptomatic cases of covid-induced myocarditis with:

Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging has the potential to identify a high-risk cohort for adverse outcomes and may, importantly, risk stratify athletes for safe participation because CMR mapping techniques have a high negative predictive value to rule out myocarditis.⁴

Coronavirus is an unpredictable disease that has widely varying effects on people. It does seem to damage heart function in some cases. What it is exceedingly unlikely to do is damage heart function undetectably.

The Big Ten's approach clears the ethical bar because it is focused on the safety of athletes first and also endeavors to be useful to the medical community, not the other way around.

Did we prioritize football over schools?

No. Football has barely been played. We prioritized bars and restaurants over schools. We prioritized political allegiances over science and therefore schools. We prioritized opening college campuses over K-12. To date, football has had an infinitesimal effect on the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, because football has barely been played.