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How COVID-19 is impacting sports

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi speak with USAToday National Sports Columnist, Dan Wolken, about what’s happening in the world of sports amid COVID-19.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: The pandemic has pushed the pause button on everything from schools, businesses, and sports. But now as life starts to come back, sports fans want, well, their sports back, too. Joining us now to discuss this Dan Wolken, a national sports columnist at USA Today. Dan, good to speak with you this morning. I think top of mind for a lot of sports fans is college football. Will there be a season? We're seeing a lot of players speak up on social media. What say you?

DAN WOLKEN: It's a little bit of a mess right now, and it speaks to the decentralized nature of how college sports is run, particularly, college football. All of these conferences are essentially fiefdoms that are allowed to kind of do their own thing. And you've seen really different opinions.

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You've got one set of people in conferences, like the Big Ten in the Pac-12, who are saying, our medical experts are telling us we need to slow down. We may need to cancel the season. And then you've got other conferences, like the SEC, saying, our medical experts are telling us to keep going on track toward our planned season in the fall.

So that really sort of leaves a lot of questions and confusion about who's medical experts are right, what are they saying, what are they talking about, what are the concerns? And the players are sort of stuck in the middle because they just have had no certainty about any of this for months and months, and yet they're trying to train and prepare for the season that may or may not happen.

So college sports is a really big mess. You've got some meetings today in some of these conferences that are going to be pretty key in determining what ends up happening.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: I want to switch to baseball for a minute because that really seems to have been a mess, Dan. They're taking one step back-- one step forward, two steps back it seems. What is baseball maybe not doing right when it comes to the virus?

DAN WOLKEN: Well, baseball decided when they were going to try to have a season, they were not going to put players in a bubble, like the NBA has done, like the NHL has done, and they were just going to try to play without fans. But that still involves teams traveling from city to city. You come to the ballpark, you play, you leave and go home, and you're not monitored or restricted necessarily other than just whatever people choose to do.

So early on, we've seen some outbreaks. And outbreaks are what is going to happen in a sporting context when people put themselves in situations where they could contract the virus. And I don't think that anyone necessarily has malicious intent, but if you go to a restaurant or a bar or whatever, you are definitely potentially exposing yourself. And then once you get in a locker room with teammates or on a plane-- they're traveling by private plane-- hanging out all the time, then there's a good chance that a lot of others will get infected if they get the virus.

So that's what baseball is trying to sort through. That's what college football is going to have to try to deal with. Any sport that's outside of a bubble is going to have to figure out how to make it work and whether or not players, frankly, can be trusted to minimize their interactions outside of sports.

BRIAN SOZZI: And Dan, let's just be blunt here, the games are pretty much boring to watch. The MLB, you have players still getting sick. At what point does Commissioner Manfred step up and say, you know what? This is a sham. We're going to cancel these games, and we're going to come back safely next year.

DAN WOLKEN: Well, look, I don't know that everyone would agree with your characterization of the games as boring. I think there's a lot of baseball fans who love the fact that the sport is up and running and they have something to watch. It's not ideal. Everybody knows that. This is being done for money, for television money. Everyone understands that on the front-end of this, that this is not a real season with a real championship at the end of it.

But as long as they can keep it going without this thing just totally going off the rails, then I think they feel like there's incentive to try to do that. So I don't think Manfred is going to just stop playing anytime soon, unless you have a bunch of other teams that have these big outbreaks like we saw with the Marlins or the Cardinals.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: Dan, I want to get back to school sports for a moment, because college sports, even high school sports, they can really boost the bottom line of these institutions. What does not having them, especially for a long period of time if this were to go on, what do you think that's going to do to some of these universities and high schools, where sports, especially those D1 schools, where sports is such a huge part of the culture of the school?

DAN WOLKEN: Well, that's what makes all of this so complicated is the fact that on a college campus, you've got these players who are generating tens of millions of dollars for these athletic departments. And yet, they're supposedly amateurs. They're college athletes. They're not getting paid. They've not negotiated any of this through a player's union. The financial incentives are not the same as they are for the players to accept certain restrictions and to put themselves at risk, frankly.

So that's where the college presidents are really struggling with some of these decisions, because there's huge liability issues, potentially. There's scientific studies that are showing higher incidence of myocarditis, which is heart inflammation, related to COVID, even in asymptomatic or mild cases. And of course, that could lead to, especially in high performing athletes if it's not treated and monitor the right way, some really ugly situations and, potentially, heart attacks or sudden death.

And that is not just a liability issue, it's a moral issue that a lot of the schools are grappling with. So it makes everything really complicated because, again, amateur athletes not getting paid, schools trying to push forward and play in a pandemic to make tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in television money so that they can keep these athletic departments afloat, it's a really, really intense and complicated dynamic that these schools have to deal with.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: Dan, you bring up excellent points there. And I just want to talk about the makeup of some of these sports teams. I mean, when you look at the NBA, they look to a high schoolers, college players--

DAN WOLKEN: Yep.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFORUS: --to recruit. What's going to happen to those teams as they are unable to get these new recruits because they simply can't even see these people play?

DAN WOLKEN: Yeah, well, obviously, for the recruiting angle, there's going to be probably more guessing that goes on. People certainly follow-- high school coaches-- or college coaches follow high school kids early on, sophomores and juniors. It's not just their senior year. So they do have some baseline on them. Certainly for the pros, they have a long data book of information on players in college. So I mean, it's definitely not ideal, but they're not working off of a total blank slate.

But yeah, look, there's going to be some high school associations in various states that aren't going to be able to play, or they're going to try to play in the spring, or they're maybe just going to try to push through and see what happens. But that's kind of where we are as a country right now is you're trying to do these things with schools. And sports is all just sort of attached to it. And we really don't know how all of this is going to go.