So Texas A&M Has A Plan For Football. Good Luck With That!
From the WSJ (behind a paywall)
Texas A& M athletic director Ross Bjork explains how the pandemic will potentially change fan traditions at Kyle Field during football games
TLDR: a fiasco in the making. Apparently students get the heave ho. Only a portion of the non student ticket holders get to attend.
BY LAINE HIGGINS
College Station, Texas, isn’t prone to earthquakes. But when 100,000-plus Texas A& M fans chant their school’s “War Hymn” at football games, the stands at Kyle Field shake. During the final verse, when the lyrics instruct the Aggies to “saw varsity’s horns off,” revelers link arms with their neighbors and turn the stadium into a rolling sea of maroon and white.
It’s one the most high-density scenes in college football, heavily reliant on human contact—and completely out of step with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic.
And now Texas A& M athletic director Ross Bjork is the man who has to figure out what that rowdy setting is supposed to look like if the nearest person is 6 feet away. It’s not clear if the college football season will start on time or at all, and whether fans will be allowed to attend when play begins.
But as the overseer of a program that is heavily dependent on fan traditions, Bjork is grappling with the question of how to stage a game at a time when the pandemic has posed previously unasked questions about mass gatherings.
“We’ll do everything we can in our power to have safeguards and follow the best practices,” said Bjork. “But a lot of it will depend on what does our society feel, what does our society think about large gatherings?”
With a capacity of 102,733, Texas A& M’s Kyle Field is one of the largest college football stadiums in the country. About 85,000 of the attendees each game are season ticket holders, with roughly 35,000 of them students.
Bjork already knows he won’t be able to accommodate all of his season-ticket holders at once if social distancing guidelines are in place. That means the university will have to sort out who gets to attend which games, which season ticket holders get priority in selecting games and how to distribute refunds.
“We’re going to present all kinds of different options, whether that is a partial refund if it is a shortened season, whether it is a full refund, whether people want to take that money and apply it to the 2021 season, whether people just want to donate that money,” said Bjork. “Physically, all 85,000 people would not fit if we have to socially distance.”
In the meantime, Texas A& M officials have informally listened to guidance from an architectural firm to map out a “socially distanced seating chart” for their famous venue. Concessions and restrooms are among the more mundane gameday functions that are being rethought.
And the university is discussing ways of allowing fans to experience Kyle Field’s electric atmosphere, even if they aren’t actually at their seats. That could mean creating viewing areas in the concourses, or common spaces with large television screens.
Like many big programs, Texas A& M has an incentive to pack as many fans into its stadium as possible. Ticket sales for all sports, football chief among them, are the athletic department’s biggest revenue source, making up approximately 32% of its $151.9 million in revenue in 2019.
But packing stadiums during the coronavirus pandemic potentially carries massive risk and runs counter to guidelines from public health officials to socially distance. Even with appropriate distance, there’s no way to enforce that attendees stay 6 feet apart.
With people screaming and potentially sneezing or coughing, aerosolized transmission is also more probable than in other settings, said Colleen Kraft, associate chief medical officer of Emory University Hospital and an infectious disease doctor who was part of the panel that guided the NCAA to shut down spring athletics. Aerosols are small particles that stay in the air longer, potentially increasing the chance a healthy person will breath them in.
“That’s what’s concerning,” Dr. Kraft said. “So that is, in a way, amplified in a stadium” because of prolonged contact over many hours with people who have mild or no symptoms.
The difficulties with staging a football game are not limited to the stadium itself. First, there’s the tailgating. Tossing around the pigskin in the parking lot or setting up a spread of communal canapes are perfect settings for viral transmission. Then, there is a potentially dangerous choke point when fans enter the stadium through security checks that, under normal circumstances, already feature long lines and close quarters. Entering a football game this fall may mean standing in a spaced out line and going through a sanitation screening after scanning your ticket, said Bjork.
Limiting contact during the concessions process will be a priority.
Bjork said Texas A& M is also considering requiring fans to bring their own reusable containers if they wish to purchase a beverage.
At this point, with coronavirus cases still rising and many states in the early phases of reopening, it’s uncertain when the next football game with fans will be played.
“One of the things that we’ve learned from watching Dr. Fauci is…we don’t control the timeline.
The virus does,” said Bjork.
—Daniela Hernandez and Adam Falk contributed to this article.
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So Texas A&M Has A Plan For Football. Good Luck With That!
