Joe Nocera, Columnist

College Football Games Are Ad Hoc Covid-19 Testing Studies

The Pac-12 and Big 10 are playing under the cover of rapid virus tests whose accuracy has not been proved.

October 23, 2020 at 3:36 PM UTC

Joe Nocera is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the host and writer of the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

Laboratory session.
Photographer: Leon Halip/Getty Images

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This weekend, after a two-month delay, the 14 football teams that make up the Big 10 athletic conference will start their season. Illinois will travel to Wisconsin for a Friday night game, and the rest of the conference will play on Saturday. The stands will be empty, but all seven games will be televised.

The Big 10 had concluded over the summer that it was too risky to play sports during the pandemic, so it postponed all the fall sports, including football. On the West Coast, the Pac-12 conference came to the same conclusion for the same reason: “Our decision was guided by science,” the Pac-12 said in its news release.