By Mark Kreidler/Kaiser Health News
On college football Saturdays, tiny Clemson, South Carolina (pop. 17,000), turns into a city of 150,000 when fanatics pour into downtown and swarm Memorial Stadium, home of the Tigers. Some don’t even have a ticket to the game, but they come with money to burn.
“It’s well north of $2 million in economic impact per game,” said Susan Cohen, president of the Clemson Area Chamber of Commerce. Hotels sell out rooms at $400 a night; some shops bring in 50% of their year’s revenue during the seven home-game weekends. Add in massive broadcasting contracts and apparel deals that enrich schools directly, and there are hundreds of millions of reasons that universities with large athletic departments and the towns they occupy don’t want to lose even one season to COVID-19.
And that’s just the dollars. There is also the intangible value of a community rallying behind a shared passion in particularly bleak times – to say nothing of the life-changing impact of scholarships to students who might have no other chance to shine or get a college education.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus dominates the conversation. Sports like football offer an ideal environment to spread a highly contagious disease: Players are in close contact for long periods inhaling one another’s sweat and saliva droplets. Even with empty stadiums, players can still infect one another, their team staffs and the communities where they study and live.
College sports are a multibillion-dollar industry, but in 2020 they’re being brought down by the same forces that have hobbled the rest of the economy. University presidents and athletic directors are playing defense amid the constantly changing landscape of the pandemic, rather than driving any sort of solid plan forward.
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Posted on August 5, 2020
