A groundbreaking study in September of student athletes who had tested positive for COVID-19 at Ohio State University determined that 30 percent had cellular heart damage and 15 percent showed signs of heart inflammation caused by a condition known as myocarditis.
Even people who are young and healthy—even healthy enough to be college athletes—may end up suffering well into their futures.
This study, undertaken by researchers at Ohio State, has massive implications for collegiate sports during the ongoing pandemic. And yet, at the time of its release, it stirred little to no reaction. Even many sports reporters, myself included, had never even heard of it.
But now, as the college football season has drawn to a close, the study has been picked up by major and minor news outlets. It was almost as if college football mavens and their stenographers on the sports pages chose to not address its findings until the season was done and all the billions of dollars in broadcast rights checks were cashed.
Revenue-producing sports like football and basketball are intrinsic to the running of the modern neoliberal university. They are the rickety tentpole that keeps the ceiling of athletic departments from crashing down. They also underwrite the multimillion-dollar salaries of college football and basketball coaching staff.
It’s a racket, and it’s the athletes—disproportionately Black—who carry the burden. They take the weight of expectation, success, and failure of a given program without a salary, without a union, without guaranteed health care, and without any of the other benefits that most workers could expect.
Instead, they are paid by being given a warped version of an “education,” where they are told what classes to take and that their scholarship could be ended on the whim of a coach. Even in the best of times, college athletics is a rotten system—one that treats these very young athletes like a combination of campus gods and corporate chattel.
Now, in the age of COVID-19, these “student athletes”—a term created by NCAA lawyers in 1957 to avoid paying a settlement to the wife of a football player killed by injuries suffered on the field—are considered “essential workers.” They have somehow been placed in the same category as frontline health-care workers, meatpacking-plant workers, and other people deemed indispensable to the economy.
The difference—aside from their lack of pay and workers’ rights—is that college athletes are not wearing any kind of personal protective equipment (PPE). They are expected, instead, to share locker rooms and fields with spitting, heaving teammates and opponents, turning the field of play into a coronavirus Petri dish. As journalist Joel Anderson tweeted, “People don’t give a shit about the health risks to a largely Black (unpaid) labor force as long as it makes money and keeps them entertained.”
This was on display in shocking fashion in the case of Keyontae Johnson. The preseason Southeastern Conference basketball player of the year from Florida State University collapsed on the court in December and almost died, a casualty of heart inflammation caused by “acute myocarditis.” His one-time lucrative future in the sport is now in doubt.
As Johnson’s story reminds us, no one knows the long-term health effects of COVID-19. Even people who are young and healthy—even healthy enough to be college athletes—may end up suffering well into their futures.
This is not a risk being borne by well-compensated professional athletes. It is being borne by unpaid eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds, many of them Black, while coaching contracts stay bloated and athletic departments, dominated by white coaches, remain flush.
COVID-19 has ripped the veil off of the NCAA; the solution requires a massive restructuring of college athletics. We need a serious reexamination of the role of revenue-producing sports on the college campus. Enough is enough. Teenagers with dreams of NFL glory should not have to risk dying for coaches’ high salaries. Pay the athletes. Give them a voice. And don’t treat them like cannon fodder against a deadly virus.