Is A Capacity Crowd At UGa A Worry?
State at low 37 percent vaccinated rate, but expert says don't give away tix yet
It is time for the University of Georgia football program to finally thread the needle and win a national championship. The Bulldogs will have to win a game where they play poorly. They have to avoid key injuries. They have to use all of July and all of August wisely to work on beating Clemson in Game 1. A ball has to bounce right.
And one more thing…
….the Dawgs have to continue to practice and play and improve in a bubble because while the coaches and players and staff are vaccinated many of their fans have not been jabbed.
Is there a serious risk of Covid infection on West Broad?
There are hedges around the field at Sanford Stadium (92,746 seating capacity). Does there need to be a moat?
Maybe, maybe not.
The more contact the players have with fans in the community the more chance they could test positive for Covid. And if they test positive there may be protocols in place to keep the players—or coaches—away from the rest of the team, and the ensuing risk of a key player missing a game.
If the schools set the protocols the possibility of losing a player to a positive test goes down because football is king and who wants to anger the head coach. But if the NCAA, or the local health office, sets protocols that changes everything.
Ask North Carolina State, whose baseball team was sent home from the College World Series because of positive tests and the stubborn refusal of their coaches and the parents of players to get vaccinated. The local health authority in Omaha, Nebraska ruled the roost in their town, not the NCAA.
The CDC said this week that 99.5 percent of the deaths from Covid are of people not vaccinated and I am enough of a sports demographer to know this includes thousands of college football fans.
So, back to the full house at Sanford Stadium.
Is this a great risk?
Zach Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College at Emory, told me he doesn’t see a great risk of a capacity crowd for football.
“I certainly see a problem with the fact that we only have a 37% vaccination rate in the state and that very much worries me,” Binney said. “We're near the bottom, along with many other southern and conservative-leaning states.
“As far as gathering for football this year, I am not actually all that worried because what we’ve learned over the last year and a half is that it is incredibly hard to transmit outside. Even if not masked, if you are in a huge outdoor stadium with air all around you, it just seems to be very, very difficult to spread the virus.
“The vast majority of transmission that you see is indoors, especially in congregate living settings like nursing homes, prisons, or workplaces, like meat-packing plants, or other gatherings, like funerals.”
I asked Zach about the Dawg Walk, that tradition of players walking through the crowd to the stadium. He doesn’t see a problem with that, though he recommends players not give out hugs.
I can bet UGa will either cancel the Dawg Walk in 2021, or create a wide parade route. The last thing that needs to happen to this program is a key player getting sidelined by Covid because of glad hands, Covid hands, that reached out on the walk and prompt a positive test.
Georgia players are at risk if they take too many risks outside the bubble, but Alabama players are really at risk. Alabama is last among states in the percentage of people vaccinated (33.3). Georgia is 45th (37.04).
One more thing: A Cobb/Douglas health department spokesperson told me there have been no reported outbreaks linked to large crowds at Truist Park.
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I’m sneaking in this link about owners of professional sports franchises getting away with paying shockingly low taxes. Read it this weekend.
The best line in the whole story:
Bill Veeck, owner of the Cleveland Indians in the 1940s and later the Chicago White Sox, stated it plainly in his memoir: “Look, we play the Star Spangled Banner before every game. You want us to pay income taxes too?”
I borrow from Bill. He said, “If you’re not buying what I’m selling, it’s my fault, not yours.” I follow that creed as I hustle for stories, 29 years now as a mercenary.
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It is going to be interesting interviewing college athletes. They are students, athletes, and now business people.
They have all kinds of side hustles now and they will slip in a mention of their brand during an interview, right? Maybe.
We (writers) will probably ask how their business is going and if these kids have been coached up by business advisors they should be prepared with snappy answers, or stories.
Can they wear a button promoting their biz while doing an interview in their UGa or Tech jersey or sweatshirt? Probably not. Should they try? Absolutely.
If they do wear the button on their red and black or old gold jersey and the UGa or Tech athletic caretakers say, “No”, is it a restriction of trade?
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The All-Star Game, which was supposed to be at Truist Park on Tuesday, is sold out at Coors Field in Denver.
You can probably get over the fact that (today) the average price of a ticket on the secondary market in the right field seats for the Home Run Derby is $600, or the get-in price on the secondary market for the game is $537. If you had two tickets to sell for each that was enough to pay for a beach place for a week.
What might be harder to get over is that Atlanta would have hosted the next Babe Ruth. The TV exposure Monday and Tuesday nights is going to be huge as the nation watches Shohei Ohtani hit one into the Coors Field seats, not the Chop House. That should sting the ATL.
And you better believe Ohtani of the Angels is going to make history by pitching and hitting in the game.
It is not going to happen at Truist Park because of the voter restriction laws passed by the Georgia state legislature.
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The average Major League Baseball game is still 3 hours, 8 minutes. I know why. MLB has all these rules about pace of play, but 1) they don’t enforce them 2) they don’t enforce them 3) they don’t enforce them.
I watched the Human Rain Delay, Matt Beaty of the Dodgers, swing-and-miss and leave the batters box. Then he took a pitch and left the batters box. You are not supposed to leave box, except on a foul ball. He straightened every part of his uniform, retightened his gloves, coughed, wheezed, did other things part of his routine, and then got back in the box.
None of those things helped him. He struck out.
The length of games and the record pace of strikeouts is too much. The hitter treating every AB as if it is the bottom of the 9th of Game 7 of a playoff series is not helping.
Also, I thought pitchers were going to pitch to contact this season with the less-bouncy ball, but they are not and 7-8-9 hitters are still trying to hit home runs. Pitchers are dancing around the strike zone, still trying to miss bats, and at bats get prolonged.
The games have been mostly fun and competitive, but there are some that can drag because of the 1-inning relief pitcher, among other factors. Just keep the hitter in the box.
The more MLB does, the more the game stays the same. Professional baseball players don’t always follow the rules.