Rumor: Regents met to discuss Michigan Stadium capacity limit in 2020
Rumor going around that the Regents met and had a meeting discussing the attendance cap at Michigan Stadium for 2020.
There apparently is a plan in place for 20,000 fans with students getting first dibs.
Take it fwiw. Lot of other schools discussing the same things right now. Iowa State announced today season ticket holders only will be able to attend games.
A general counterpoint is that the triggering event for the massive spread in northern Italy is believed to have been a soccer match, outdoors in the open air. Lower transmission doesn't imply no transmission. People will almost certainly transmit the virus in a stadium, it's a question how well you can create a preventative environment and what everyone (government, university, individuals, etc) is comfortable with in terms of trade offs.
That seems like a fairly relevent data point. Imagine that cramming a bunch of people who are Screaming and yelling into a stadium for 2+ hours would be very different than most outdoor situations.
I agree that its relevant but there may be many things that could limit the potential of the same thing happening at a Michigan game. We would have a stadium at 20% capacity as opposed to 100% capacity. The people in the stadium are more likely to limit things like hugging and high fiving. There are also the various indoor environments that likely contributed to the spread. Unfortunately, we don’t know, and its likely impossible to know, how much of the spread occurred in the stadium vs in places likes bars and restaurants that I am sure were packed before and after the event. You also have the issue of how people traveled to the event. Its Europe so you likely had full trains brining people there and taking them home. I would also assume the bathroom situation at the stadium was typical of what we see at most sold out events.
Screening is also an issue. If we screen people for temperature before entry, we can reduce the number of individuals in the stadium with potential to infect others. Combine this with education about staying home if you have any symptoms and you further reduce the risk.
With the right mix of risk mitigation measures I think there is a good chance you can reduce the risk of almost certain transmission in the stadium to something lower. Now if your goal is 100% or close to 100% safety from Covid-19 at the stadium its not going to give you that.
As an example of how the science of COVID-19 is still evolving and confusing, Japanese health authorities have concluded the opposite about asymptomatic carriers (boldface mine):
"...they found that most clusters originated in gyms, pubs, live music venues, karaoke rooms, and similar establishments where people gather, eat and drink, chat, sing, and work out or dance, rubbing shoulders for relatively extended periods of time.
They also concluded that most of the primary cases that touched off large clusters were either asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms.
“It is impossible to stop the emergence of clusters just by testing many people,” Oshitani says. This led them to urge people to avoid what they dubbed the “three Cs”—closed spaces, crowds, and close-contact settings in which people are talking face-to-face.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/japan-ends-its-covid-19-state-emergency
Yep, you have to have about 10 different contingency plans in place because nobody knows what things are going to look like in 3 months. They would be stupid not to discuss things like this as possibilities right now (and put together a committee to really hash out how these changes could possibly be implemented).
Interesting that only one of the multiple contingency plans that they are discussing is subject of what OP calls "Rumor going around," but that's how Rumor works, I guess.
Somewhere around 25%, with a good portion of them being students, sounds like the right number. I don't think they can go higher than that this year; even 25% will be a challenge to pull off.
Beyond public health standards, giving people plenty of room will help alleviate how on edge some people are going to be.
You think it gets contentious with the pale yellow sweater type behind you when you stand up during a key 3rd down to cheer on the team? Imagine the "discussions" that will happen if someone a couple seats behind someone has a coughing fit throughout the game. Or when/if someone has loud thoughts to share on whether you should/shouldn't wear a mask.
Beyond public health standards, giving people plenty of room will help alleviate how on edge some people are going to be.
If they are on edge they shouldn't be at a football game. It's a choice to attend.
Who's arguing with that? Obviously it's a choice.
But some people will feel their choice to attend, safely, is being infringed upon by the guy a few seats over hacking up a lung. Or the guy hacking a lung will (truthfully) say "It's just my asthma!", yet people won't believe him & call for him to be removed, he'll refuse, etc.
They may not have been on edge before getting to the game, but once something happens, things escalate quickly.
That's why keeping people as separated as possible is going to be necessary.
The spacing doesn’t need to be as dramatic as 1 swat every 3rd/4th seat. People who live together and travel to the game together don’t need spacing.
Ideally seats would be sold as singles, pairs, sets of 3 and sets of 4 with spacing between those “blocks”.
As for toilets, give up the beer for a day and that solves a big pct of the problem!
I agree with everything but the beer part.
Michigan Stadium doesn't sell beer.
Lol. Thanks for the info. But 40 years of season tickets tells me that A FEW people consume beer leading up to the game!
But most certainly not at Pioneer or the golf course
Say there is a small percentage of non student fans allowed, you could hold a lottery for each home game and even try to get most people one game. Maybe your capacity even increases as the year goes on if a second wave isn't bubonic like some assume.
If you draw Ball State, them's the breaks. If you don't want to go, there will be demand for you to sell.
This season will be interesting. I think if a bunch of people are forced to watch from home this year a lot will not come back as far as buying expensive season tickets paired with a hefty seat donation. What does the athletic department do with all that lost profit?
sadly I've been weighing this option over the last number of years as it just becomes less and less appealing to deal with all the crap...later start times, night game traffic, PSD fees, increasing ticket prices...that TV on the wall and unlimited access to food, soda, and bathrooms is hard to argue if this goes lottery system to watch a game...particularly this season where there is one perhaps two games with reasonable appeal as it is.
The more I think about this, the more true it seems. We have been talking for years about a sports attendance bubble. I think we can be pretty comfortable thinking that the bubble has burst.
We had been pricing young people out of the stadium for a couple of decades now, and we have been making the stadium experience worse and the TV experience better every year in many different ways. And now, add in the fact that people will likely have an aversion to large crowds moving forward, and add in the other fact that people who go to the games out of habit or tradition will be forced out of that habit this year, and you have an attendance crash on your hands.
It's not just young people priced out. I do fairly well, but when the cost of taking my family to a single (cupcake) game is several hundred dollars I can think of many better uses for that money. From the parking, to the concessions, to the crazy high ticket prices, I just feel like I'm getting hosed.
We only go once per season, if that.
I endorse the above statement 100%.
I’m increasing my donations. If I can’t go to games and get concessions to support all 31 teams I’m gonna give more on my monthly.
Ironically WD that may become a more common norm for diehard UM fans and alums...instead of purchasing tickets, they may contribute more, but I can't see it completely close that gap. If you collapse the football money machine, straight-line donations would potentially be a fraction of the estimated $175 million per year or whatever the figure actually is. I'd guess you won't be alone.
If the opportunity is available I'm going to be at any and every game.
I have zero doubt, and I'd likely do the same, though here's the double-edged sword, no football, no fall/winter sports (particularly winter assuming whatever fears/spread/lockdown triggers no football, no way they ramp up INDOORS at the peak of virus season). Which as we all know, means no spring sports. This may not even become a Michigan choice, assume Michigan has the money to pull of spring sports, how many other schools will remain to play against?
TV blackouts become all the rage?
Oh god. I remember TV stations and/or radio stations having to buy up the last 3,000 tickets just so fans could watch the Lions on TV.
Man that would be fun to see a game in that setting.
I lived in Chicago before NW updated Ryan field. They had a fence line behind the players 10 feet in front of the bleachers like a high school stadium. You could stand at the fence line and follow the game right at the line of scrimmage up and down the field.
I never missed a Michigan there. Just awesome.
I don’t understand how they think 20,000 will work. That’s 1 in 5 seats filled. Imagine looking to your left to see 4 empty seats and then to your right to see four empty seats. Now the rows in front and behind you would have to be empty, right?
Maybe they do pods of, say, 5 or 10 people together with a lot of space between pods? Probably not ideal from public health perspective, but small groups clumped together...can't interact with other groups, can talk to each other, and can be easily contact traced if one shows an illness?
this is assuming none of the people attending are close family. I take my son, my father, sister, uncle, and cousin(s)...why would we need to sit apart? We are in close regular contact...there are ways to plan, and perhaps everyone isolate no matter what is the only option.
I'd think they'd have to look at sections dedicated to family seating. It seems like it would be a nightmare trying to enforce social distancing if self identifying family groups are scattered everywhere.
yeah without a doubt. Our group would have no issue sitting in the seats we are assigned, but how does a stadium assistant determine my group dissociated from your family joining us or sitting too close? Nearly impossible.
I think it's more like this:
- Family of four attends and has 3 empty seats (each) in front; back; right; left.
Considering how small the seats are at the stadium, and how people tend to wander a bit from their assigned seat (that's going to be fun to enforce!), that will give people, hopefully, more than enough room to feel they can pay $500-$1000 for their family to attend a game and for everyone (the fans; the school; the public health department) to be safe.
If the health stats keep improving, you can always sell a few thousand more seats. But I don't think they want to sell a bunch and then have to pick & choose which ones to cancel.
...that's exactly how it would work.
The AD is gonna sell the other 80,000+ tickets to Stephen Ross for $1 so we can keep announcing we're over 100,000 every week
Screw $1 dollar. Ticket sales and associated fees generate $75 million per year. Ross is worth $7.6 billion. Just have him cut a check and the financial concerns of the athletic department are one less thing to worry about for the year.
The assumption of distancing 1 seat by 6ft is flawed. On the few occasions that I have had a chance to come back for a game it is usually in a group of up to 8 people. If you space groups like that then I think 40K in the bowl becomes easily achievable, then add on the luxury seating (does anyone know how many of those seats there are?). Regardless, I still think by September the reality of this disease is going to become more apparent and people are going to realize the gross over-reaction that we have put ourselves through
So in 2.5 months, despite some unprecedented actions to stem the spread of the virus, some 1.7 million Americans and rising have become infected and over 100,000 have died. With both numbers almost certainly underreported and the actual figures being significantly higher.
Please explain what the “reality” of this disease, which we’ll understand by September, that will show how we grossly overreacted. TIA.
Studies of the previous flu seasons estimate from antigen testing that 10s of millions of Americans fend off the flu each year without knowing it.
Deaths are counted very accurately. Current rules pay extra for COVID-19 diagnosis and rules are aggressive in favor of COVID-19. Florida data entry clerk was fired for refusing to check the name of deceased before entering count. U.S. had a 100k death flu season a few years back and no one suggested a lockdown (face masks in flu season have been discussed.)
That 100k flu season was for A WHOLE YEAR and no special measures were put in place to stem the spread.
We’ve hit 100k in 3 months WITH extraordinary measures in place.
Do you really not see the difference?
I see that Sweden, Florida, Georgia, and Texas are doing well without over reacting while Delaware and California continue to have their problems. It all seems to be related to how it started more than how much was shut down after it started. I also know that regions with sharp rises had sharp declines and that many regions have lingering cases long after the shutdown was given time to work.
Science - state your hypothesis, run the experiment, data mixed, conclusion is that the effect of shutdowns has not been shown to be better than the effect of not shutting down. So one could then justify saying that shutting down was an over reaction.
And the cases and deaths are not being under reported. Too many people are paid more if they have to treat a CV-19 death. New York's numbers are way out of line with the rest of New England. It looks like they are under counting nursing home deaths or over counting total CV-19 deaths. Some like to say that Georgia and Florida are under counting but so far we only have the word of a staff member that officially terminated for entering numbers with checking for duplicates. It think it would be difficult to hide a spike in this environment.
Actually I agree with you. The infected number is grotesquely under-estimated. And THAT is precisely the problem with the prognostication going on regarding this disease. By using confirmed cases (when multiplied by your favorite finagling factor) you get an infection rate which is then used to project everything like expected deaths, and hospital beds needed etc. What I expect to happen in the 2.5 months is that the normal cycle of almost every respiratory disease in human history will take place and the virus will become pretty much a non-factor by the end of July. Post-mortems will start being done by people who are not vested in fluffing the numbers up to justify draconian reactions, and we will se that the actual deaths caused by COVID are significantly (not grossly) overstated. Simplistic examples are people in hospice who were exposed and showed positive for COVID, but died from whatever put them in hospice, who are now being counted as COVID deaths.
That, plus the realization that, welcome to the brave new world, COVID is now the status quo, and we better figure out how to live with it (and I don't mean wearing masks and and staying away form each other). If we can't do that then we are lost anyway.
So in the fall, put the people with the lowest risk from COVID (student age) back to where they should be, school. Hold the games, and if you are high risk and do no twant to expose yourself, don't go to the game. Myself, I have several risk factors, but I would chose to go to the game.
I'm certain it's not going to be 1 seat, then 6 feet away and the next person (that'd be way less than 20K). They'd have groups (2,4,6,8/whatever number they decide on) available and then there's essentially 6 feet of space completely around that group (sides, forwards, and backwards).
Shouldn’t it be 20,001?
I love the idea of students only, frankly. Put them all right behind the visiting team's bench.
Probably what would happen because that’s the TV side.
Shit if they only let students in MSU home games would have like ten people.
I'm all for doing this in the safest manner possible, but my question is when it comes to non-students, how do you decide who gets in and who doesn't? Who gets to go see Michigan play Penn State and Wisconsin, and then who gets to see Maryland, Indiana and Arkansas State? My initial assumption is who's cut the biggest donation check gets to go to the biggest games.
If that's the case, the Athletic Department is about to have a whole other firestorm on its hands. Granted, unless we somehow get to the point in three months where stadiums can be full there is no possible solution that makes everyone happy, but I just know that there will be a lot of people wanting their money back.
EDIT: I hope this 20k includes the band. I know that might be a tough proposition since you're asking the band to stand, sit, and play next to each other, but I would hope the band can take part if for no other reason than to bring back some small modicum of normalcy to the game.
My son plays in his high school marching band. They are planning to have a band in the fall, but with major changes to their normal routines.
If there’s room to spread out 20,000 fans, there’s certainly room to spread out the band. The Block M may just be a little more spread out than normal.
It honestly doesn't make that much sense. Either we are at a place where tens of thousands of people can be together in which case you could do more than 20k seats or we aren't and it should be no fans.
If students are being brought back to campus I could see allowing students and students only in. Just make it free admission for students, no concession stands open, etc. and that is it.
If I had billions in my bank account, I would donate funds to guarantee students free attendance to Michigan Stadium this season (assuming it happens in some form). That would be less than $5 million, assuming 20000 students @ $25 per ticket. Maybe they would erect a Naked Bootlegger statue on the north end of the stadium in my honor. I'd even settle for an inflatable statue that only lasts for the season.