College football teams are divided on COVID vaccines. Why they aren’t an easy sell

Mack Brown recently held one of the most important meetings of the year for his football team at North Carolina. It had little to do with football and everything to do with positioning the Tar Heels to maximize their considerable potential. It was not a meeting about strategy, in the traditional sense, though the opponent was as formidable as any UNC might face.

In some instances, that opponent was disinformation. In others, it was a purer form of hesitancy. It was, overall, the resistance among the holdouts on his team, the motives and skepticism driving those players who’ve yet to receive a vaccine for COVID-19.

“I’m advising our players to get it,” Brown said earlier this week at the ACC’s annual preseason football kickoff. “We brought in a doctor from the CDC, and had him meet with our team and their parents. I told them they should get the vaccine,” and Brown paused slightly before revealing a matter-of-fact truth he’s come to accept.

“You’re still going to have some get it, and some not,” he said. “So what we’re working on is getting 85 percent herd immunity, so we can get back to our meeting rooms and we can get back to our team meetings, we can get back to our training table.”

It was Wednesday, and the affable Brown, always a popular draw at these gatherings, was surrounded by cameras and reporters who stood in a tight half-circle a few rows deep. UNC is among college football’s preseason darlings, a team with a viable Heisman Trophy candidate, Sam Howell, at quarterback, and aspirations of competing with Clemson for the league championship.

And yet it has become clear that a season with great hope can be derailed with quickness off the field. There was enough proof of that about 25 miles east of UNC’s Chapel Hill campus, in Raleigh, where the N.C. State baseball team returned home last month after positive COVID-19 tests forced the Wolfpack out of the College World Series.

The team had been one victory away from advancing to the championship series. Weeks later the plight of N.C. State baseball had become a paragon of a college athletics’ worst-case scenario — a harbinger of what could happen if enough players on a team, any team, forgo the vaccine.

Underneath all the hope and optimism at ACC Kickoff in Charlotte was the specter of the unknown, the reality that the pandemic still was not over. It was the reality that another conference team, in a different sport, just ended its season in a particularly cruel way — and that the Wolfpack could’ve avoided it all if only enough players had been vaccinated.

COVID-19 cases have risen nationally in recent weeks, with experts attributing the increase to the more contagious Delta variant. That strain of the virus has magnified the risk for the unvaccinated, especially, and has reinforced the truth that the pandemic is not over.

“I told our guys months ago that that Delta variant is coming, guys, it’s coming,” Pat Narduzzi, the head coach at Pittsburgh, said here on Wednesday. “And it’s here now. And what are we doing to make sure it stops? The most important thing I’ve got as a head coach is to protect our football program, our university, and make sure we go out and play a season unlike what we did last year. I would not want to go through another season like that.”

Indeed, the 2020 college football season was often a spectacle, an exercise in the absurd. Teams played before largely empty stadiums in made-for-TV (and television revenue) games, if they played at all. Postponements were common. The most fortunate of teams persevered through multiple virus tests per week and life in the makeshift bubbles created in the name of football. The least fortunate teams went several weeks between games.

That the ACC hosted an in-person kickoff event at all was, in itself, a sign of a resumption of normalcy. And yet, as Narduzzi put it, a nastier version of COVID-19 is “here now” and cases are surging. Though it’s a safe assumption that the 2021 season won’t be as much of a mess as the 2020 season, nobody can be sure what the fall might look like.

“It would break my heart, as it did this summer, for any of our student-athletes or coaches who continue to work so hard on their sports to have to miss a game due to a positive test or contact tracing,” Jim Phillips, the ACC Commissioner, said during his opening address at kickoff, alluding to N.C. State’s baseball team.

Later that day, DeWayne Carter, a defensive lineman at Duke, pondered the question of whether a school like his, which has required that its students become vaccinated, had indirectly created a competitive advantage against those schools without a vaccine requirement.

“What comes to mind is the N.C. State baseball team, and their vaccination situation, COVID situation,” Carter said. “I thought they were going to end up taking it all, winning the championship.”

What happened to N.C. State has undoubtedly provided college coaches with a compelling argument against vaccine skepticism. Narduzzi discussed with his Pitt players the Wolfpack’s exit from the College World Series.

Some were familiar and those who weren’t were “shocked,” Narduzzi said, that a promising season could end so abruptly, and so close to a national championship. In the Wolfpack’s case, positive COVID-19 tests among unvaccinated players triggered an NCAA policy to test players who were vaccinated. When some of those tests came back positive, N.C. State was sent home.

“You never know when you’ll ever get back there,” said Jordan Addison, a Pitt wide receiver. “That’s one of the talks that we had, and that made us think that like, yeah — maybe everybody should get this.”

College athletics and the NCAA are hardly monolithic enterprises. They are composed of conferences that in many ways set their own rules and schools that have their own rules within those conference rules. While the NFL and other professional sports leagues are free to implement policies that essentially make vaccination mandatory, it’s not so simple in college football.

In the ACC, as in conferences across the country, wide disparities have emerged in how member schools have approached the vaccination effort. Seven of the ACC’s 15 schools are requiring that students and staff become vaccinated before classes begin for the fall semester, though one of those schools, Notre Dame, is not an ACC member in football.

That leaves six of the ACC’s 14 football members with a vaccine mandate for students, and eight without. The divide is not, as one might suspect, purely between public and private institutions, though it’s close. Boston College, Duke, Syracuse and Wake Forest are all private, and all require students to become vaccinated. But so are Virginia and Virginia Tech, which are public.

Miami, another private school, is not requiring vaccination. Neither are the ACC’s other seven members — including UNC and N.C. State — which are all public. While the divide isn’t completely between public and private, it does fall more closely along political lines. Miami is the ACC’s only private school without a vaccine mandate and resides in a state with a Republican governor who has often balked at pandemic-related restrictions and mandates.

Virginia and Virginia Tech, meanwhile, are the only ACC public schools in a state with both a Democratic governor and a Democratic-controlled state legislature. Asked if he would have favored a broader mandate from on high that UNC require vaccinations for everyone, Brown, the Tar Heels’ coach, smiled and said, “I stay in my lane.”

“They didn’t ask me,” he said. “So, what I’m trying to do is figure out 85 percent.”

The 85 percent threshold has become the magic number in sports, both professionally and in college. Major League Baseball teams that have reached that point are bound by less restrictive COVID protocols, and the NFL has implemented a similar policy. The ACC has yet to finalize its policies, but it seems certain that teams with an 85 percent vaccination rate will be subject to relaxed guidelines surrounding testing and contract tracing, which dominated last season.

Phillips, the ACC Commissioner, said Wednesday that half of the league’s football teams had met the 85 percent threshold, “with several others on the cusp.” UNC is not quite there yet, and if N.C. State had reached that point, then Dave Doeren, the Wolfpack’s head coach, was unaware when he met with reporters in Charlotte.

“Where we’re at numbers-wise, we’re going to be in a good place,” Doeren said Thursday. “I don’t know exactly what our percentage is today. I feel comfortable with where we’re headed. Guys have to make decisions for themselves.

“I just want to know why they’re making those decisions, and can I help them get the info to make the right ones for them and protect us, protect our team, but ultimately make them feel good about the decisions they’ve made.”

Doeren said “it was heartbreaking to watch” what unfolded with the N.C. State baseball team in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Wolfpack won its first three games before the virus outbreak left it short-handed in a narrow defeat against Vanderbilt. Hours after that loss, State’s best chance at a national championship since its basketball team’s triumph in 1983 had come to an end.

It was “an opportunity to learn,” Doeren said, and he’d had several one-on-one conversations with players about becoming vaccinated.

“My job is to help these young men grow, help these guys compete, put them in the best places they can be, and keep them as safe as I can keep them,” Doeren said. “At the same time, it’s not my job to make medical decisions for our football team. All I can do is educate them, get them around the people that can help them make great choices.

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

Along with the other routine preseason cliches that are always common around this time of year — ones about renewed hope, or how this year will be different, or those about new cultures or renewed commitment — a new cliche emerged in Charlotte in the vaccine era: It’s a personal choice. Players and coaches repeated variations of the phrase throughout Wednesday and Thursday.

“I believe that vaccinations are critical to the protection of all and helping to achieve the goal of eliminating the COVID-19 virus and its variants,” Phillips said. “But I also deeply respect that getting vaccinated is a personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” said C.J. Avery, a Louisville linebacker.

“It’s just up to each player,” said Tomon Fox, a UNC linebacker.

“I think it’s anybody’s right to get it, or if they don’t want to, that’s totally up to them,” said Payton Wilson, an N.C. State linebacker.

“It’s everyone’s personal decision,” said James Skalski, a Clemson linebacker, before adding: “But it certainly doesn’t feel that way sometimes.”

At six ACC schools, though, the choice is less personal and more black-and-white. Even those schools, though, allow for exemptions — usually either religion- or medical-based — for players to opt out of the vaccine. At Virginia, Bronco Mendenhall, the Cavaliers head coach, said more than 90 percent of his team had been vaccinated and that those players who haven’t received a waiver.

Few coaches in the country experienced the sort of pandemic-related disruptions that Mendenhall endured a season ago, when his team didn’t play a game until late September. Its first four season-openers were postponed due to the virus, which is part of the reason why Mendenhall has come to favor a policy that would require teams to forfeit games it can’t play because of positive COVID tests.

“I haven’t had any conversation yet with any other coaches, and so I might be the outlier on that but a year ago I felt the same way,” Mendenhall said.

The question of whether to require teams to forfeit instead of postpone games due to virus-related disruptions is one the ACC has yet to decide. Phillips said he’s hoping the conference formalizes its COVID-19 policies by the middle of August, if not sooner, but that those decisions are in the hands of the league’s medical advisory group and the presidents of member schools.

In the meantime, coaches are in a race against the clock to encourage their unvaccinated players to become vaccinated during the next five weeks, before the start of the season. College football coaches are known for being detailed-oriented sticklers who leave little to chance, but the pandemic has revealed a divide in how some coaches approach COVID vaccines.

Bryan Harsin, the head coach at Auburn, declined to tell reporters at SEC media days whether he was vaccinated. Nick Rolovich, the coach at Washington State, did not attend the Pac-12’s media days because he is not yet vaccinated. On the other end of the spectrum, Manny Diaz, the Miami coach, said he invited personnel from Walgreens to come to the Hurricanes’ practice facility and make shots available for players. Brown invited the CDC doctor to speak with members of his team. Narduzzi, the Pittsburgh coach, recently described a long conversation he shared with one of his players who was resistant.

“A really smart kid, guy that’s working on a master’s and an MBA now, but was really hesitant,” Narduzzi said. “It’s like, just sitting down, talking to him about, hey, what are you thinking — a lot of times it’s just that one-on-one conversation as opposed to a team meeting.”

Skalski, the linebacker at Clemson, might have identified the primary reason why some college football players are resistant to seeking out the shots, more than reasoning based on religious beliefs or medical conditions: “We’re all young, healthy,” he said. “We’re young men, you know? I don’t feel like we’re that, you know — in the danger zone, per se, for the virus.”

“Because we’re in Clemson, we’re together, training,” he continued. “But moving forward, we have a season to play, so I think you’ll see a lot more guys getting the vaccine.”

Another question came about the vaccine and Skalski started to answer, stopped and smiled and said, “I don’t even really want to get into all this, to be honest with you.” Nonetheless he continued, describing a hypothetical scenario involving a freshman who might never play over the course of a season.

“Why shove that on them?” Skalski said. “Everyone’s got their own decision to make and I think to a point it’s almost a little unfair how much attention it’s getting. Because, again, it’s everyone’s personal decision. But it certainly doesn’t feel that way sometimes. But I just think it’s getting a lot more attention than it needs to be.

“I mean, either you’re going to get the vaccine or you’re not, and go from there.”