This week the duo dives into some of the narratives surrounding the return of college football, paying athletes and the lasting, unknown impact, of COVID-19
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00:00What's going on, everybody? It's another edition of Carolina Connection. I'm Chantel Powell
00:05with Sports Illustrated's Game Cop Digest, joined as usual by Kierra Lutt with Sports
00:11Illustrated's Altar Hills site. How are you doing today?
00:14I am doing amazing. How are you doing?
00:16Feeling good. Feeling great. We had a pretty eventful week, starting with up in North Carolina.
00:24You guys made headlines. I'll go ahead and let you explain what went down.
00:29So what's going on in Chapel Hill is just trying to correct the wrong. I think Carolina
00:38is realizing that going back to school was not the best plan of action. And I honestly
00:45don't think when you look back at the time period that all the decisions had to be made,
00:49there's so much going on. You're trying to think about sports and you're trying to think
00:53about not just football, all fall off athletics. And then, you know, right about, you know,
01:00almost 20,000 students. It's a lot. So it's Carolina is going through a cleanse in a sense.
01:08They have went completely remote since Wednesday, August 19th. And then they stopped, they suspended
01:15athletics. So there has not been a football practice since Wednesday. The good thing is,
01:20is that despite the clusters around Carolina, the fraternity houses, sorority houses and
01:26the different parties that they were having, the football team has a 100% clean bill of
01:31health and coach Mack Brown has made sure that his players were stayed focused on football
01:37and academics. He told his players, look, let me worry about everything else. You just
01:42make sure you stay healthy. They are getting tested weekly. And with those weekly tests,
01:48they are getting results back within 24 hours. So the football team has been accidentally
01:53put in a bubble, which is something that coach Mack Brown said kind of resembles the NBA
01:58with students going remote. The football players were already mostly remote. So it's nothing
02:03new for them really. But they are now officially in a bubble.
02:07And y'all shut it down at record time because I looked up and the students was on campus
02:13playing no games. UNC was like, we are done Wednesday, pack your bags, go home. I mean,
02:22and it's, it's more than just worrying about students and worrying about fall athletics.
02:26It's also worrying about surrounding communities, you know, Chapel Hill in itself, Carlbrook.
02:32And if you think about Chapel Hill, in a sense, Durham is right there. You know, Duke is literally
02:38seven miles down the road. And then on top of that, NC State is like 20 minutes up the street,
02:44maybe 30. So there's a lot of universities around here. So, you know, thankfully, they thought of
02:51more than just let's just think about UNC. What about, you know, the community? You know, how
02:56are we, you know, impacting the people who support us the most? So they kind of had to.
03:03Yeah, so everybody kind of followed y'all's lead, right? You shut down too.
03:07So NC State also went remote. They had clusters. East Carolina, not only did they have clusters
03:15on campus, and I went to East Carolina, but they also, their football players had tested positive.
03:21I believe one did. So it's more than just, you know, it's keeping these students alive and,
03:28you know, having them, you know, in a safe, controlled environment. So it seems that the
03:33best course of action was just go home. Let your parents worry about it. We're done. We tried it.
03:39You know, send your home to mom and daddy for now.
03:43And, you know, sometimes that's how it's got to be. South Carolina had first week of classes,
03:48and they seemed to do it, I guess, as ideally as one would hope. They gave the students masks
03:56upon arrival. They have rapid testing, which is really, really important because it's not
04:01enough to just get the test, but you can still take the test and then contract the virus between
04:07when the results come back. If you're getting it, you know, three to five, nine to 12, 15 days,
04:12so they have rapid results. One thing I thought was interesting, I read in an article that they
04:16have cameras installed and a bit of surveillance to make sure people are socially distancing and
04:23wearing their mask. Now, I don't know what happens if you're not, like if somebody jumps
04:27out with glitches and is like, hey, put your mask on. You know, public campus, they have every right
04:35to kind of monitor what's going on and make sure things are, you know, copacetic. I wonder if it's
04:41like the same security cameras, like, you know, you have the little emergency call thing. Like,
04:46I wonder if it kind of lines up with that, because that would make the most sense to me.
04:50Otherwise, like that's a big investment, if not. Yeah, it's huge. I think that says a lot to what
04:57USC is willing to do to make sure students are safe, but it also, on the playing devil's advocate,
05:04like to go to that many lengths to make sure that school happens instead of just going remote,
05:10it's, you know, it's a good and a bad thing, like spending all this money to allow them to come to
05:16school, but also spending all this money to allow them to come to school. So that's, that's, you know.
05:23And I get that, but I think at this point, it's kind of tab and fever, you know, because
05:28everybody remembers when you go home those first couple weeks.
05:36That first period when you're home on summer break and stuff, and you're ready to go,
05:40you know, live the life you were living in college, and then for the freshmen,
05:45you know, it's supposed to be a new experience for them. I get trying to give the kids some sort
05:50of normalcy, and so to me, if you're going to try and do that, do it that way, where you're putting
05:55in the money, and you're really investing and making it something to where you're not