Trump calls on college football games to resume amid pandemic
“The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled,” the President tweeted on Monday, adding the hashtag #WeWantToPlay.
In his message, Lawrence called for the conferences to allow student athletes to play football this season, establish universal health and safety protocols, and allow players to opt out of the season, among other measures.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany confirmed Monday afternoon that Trump would like to see college football “safely resume.”
“A lot of these college athletes work their whole lives to get four years; sometimes they’re redshirted an extra year if they’re lucky. They work their whole lives for this moment, and he’d like to see them have a chance to live out their dreams,” she added.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a member of the NCAA’s COVID-19 Advisory Panel, told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin Monday afternoon that college football teams face challenges different from the challenges faced by professional leagues.
Unlike the NHL and the NBA, Adalja said, student athletes do not typically isolate away from their peers at school and compete in a “bubble” cordoned off from the outside world.
“The bubble seems to work, but you can’t do that with students, and I think that people forget that,” he said. “It is not necessarily that they’re getting infected on the field, but they’ll bring what they’ve contracted in the community on to the field.”
CNN’s Kevin Dotson and Hollie Silverman contributed to this report.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect UConn’s relationship with the Football Bowl Subdivision.