American Sport in the Shadow of a Pandemic

Andrew C. Billings, Lawrence A. Wenner, and Marie Hardin

Time moving.

Time standing still.

What is the difference?

Time standing still is the difference.

– Lorrie Moore (2014)

For most American sports fans, March 13, 2020 was the “day the music died.” While the American public had been warned for weeks (if not months) about the potential for a pandemic, the March 13 cancellation of an NBA basketball game resulting from a COVID-19 diagnosis from Utah’s Rudy Gobert seemingly hastened the call to cancel all other sporting events, serving as one of the signals for a nation to begin sheltering-in-place. Once sporting contests were halted to limit contagion, sports programming and coverage darkened across the American mediascape. With those lights going out in ways never before experienced by wide swatches of the population, embedded patterns of “sports talk” fueled by game results and other ritualized dynamics of the contemporary sportsworld lost their anchor and were destined to be disrupted.

Warren Buffett once opined that “only when the tide rolls out do you discover who’s been swimming naked” (Tchir, 2020, para. 1). On March 13, the tide gradually rolled out and suddenly the structures undergirding the American world of sport was left for all to see. Time seemingly stopped, and the sports calendars many used to occupy their time were suddenly replaced with products such as virtual contests of basketball players competing in games of H-O-R-S-E from their homes. The centrality of sport ←xi | xii→within American culture was laid bare for all to see, taking with it many of the hotels, restaurants, and sporting goods industries that had long counted on deep-seated engagement with sport to provide dependable momentum to help fill their coffers.

Consider the role of the fan. To what extent is sport fandom a three-legged stool, fusing athletics, media, and fans for a shared experience? The pandemic revealed much about both the sound and look of fans in a stadium as well as the economic role that fans, in and out of the stadium, serve. The National Football League, for instance, makes 60% of their revenue from ←xii | xiii→national media contracts before a single stadium seat or luxury box is sold (Novy-Williams, 2020). That number escalates to over 70% and sometimes even 80% when local media is taken into account. Suddenly the “bubbles” used to isolate league players to keep the game going made sense; money would be lost, but the outsized role of media could make such losses survivable.

The show must go on.

Turning to the intercollegiate sport marketplace, the amounts invested into football and men’s basketball, in particular, had been escalating for some time. The average Power Five college head coach was making US$4.4 million (Berkowitz & Schad, 2020). Some teams were even hiring “consultants” for half-million dollar salaries. When the pandemic hit, 40 of the 50 states had a highest-paid public employee who was either a football or basketball coach (Duffley, 2019). Indeed, one could certainly complain about Nick Saban’s US$9.3 million salary, but must temper it with the financial realities that the football program he leads often brings in over triple that amount in profit (Kercheval, 2015). Meanwhile, Alabama’s rival, Auburn University, was so invested in staying competitive that it has spent US$47 million in buyouts for football and basketball coaches (Wittry, 2019). Yes, US$47 million just to get coaches to leave. The pandemic revealed why such sums were spent on college sports coaches. Indeed, much of the appeal of a quintessential American university experience was predicated on more than mere class attendance. And while sport was an “ancillary” to American higher education, it had become a big ancillary, in some instances a tail wagging the dog. On many campuses, sport contributes to both socialty and identity amongst faculty, staff, students, and alumni, matters made possible by regularized major sports events and the ways in which they may be celebrated in media coverage. Faced with virtual classes and a sports calendar that precluded their attendance, the pandemic resulted in millions of out-of-state students staying home, costing schools (and local businesses in college towns) millions of dollars in lost revenue. Again, amidst these challenges, media served as a key support structure that helped many universities avoid utter financial calamity.

The games must go on.

Indeed, the pandemic showed what was intractable and what was not. As it turned out, a sports schedule was quite malleable. Coronavirus outbreaks meant that the Buffalo Bills woke up on Monday, October 12, 2020 not knowing if they were playing the Tennessee Titans on Tuesday or the Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday. It turned out the Titans game (rescheduled twice already) would happen and the game against the Chiefs would move to the following Monday. Suddenly, the fact that the University of Texas and Arizona State University were already contracted to play a football game ←xiii | xiv→in 2033 seemed to embody a bit of overzealous scheduling. In the “new abnormal,” planning now entailed focusing on what might happen today or tomorrow, and, even thinking about next week presented challenges. Baseball found its schedule could be truncated (from 162 to 60 games), games could be shortened (to seven innings when necessary) and doubleheaders (previously avoided to maximize gate and media revenues) could be a regular feature (after an outbreak, the St. Louis Cardinals played 11 doubleheaders in a months’ time). The world did not stop. As sports how to continue play amidst the uncertainties of the pandemic, people still watched – albeit in smaller numbers, distracted perhaps by personal life challenges and stress, but also because of the now realigned calendar of sports events. After being stopped in its tracks, a diverse set of sports flooded the calendar all at once, in and out of season, all in a jumble, all necessarily entangled in storylines about the pandemic and the realities of and prospects for disruption. Sport had skidded to a stop, been restarted en masse, going quickly from zero to 60, but hitting a few potholes. But for sports fans momentarily mourning the loss of live sports, there was now cause for celebration, but this was a changed party.

We advance this book not only for these aforementioned reasons, but also because we believe that communication becomes a key disciplinary vantage point for scholarly exploration for the dynamics at play in the world of sport and its impacts on American culture. Embedded within all of these cases were the communication processes and mechanisms that were either thwarted or utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic. These forms of communication ranged from those set in interpersonal, group, and organizational contexts, to the responses of legacy mainstream media to social and user-generated media in the digital environment. Surely, communication scholars can bring ←xiv | xv→much to the table by adding insight about the how the pandemic fueled disruptions on sport were responded to and understood. Sport, it is often said, is a mirror of society. The mirror held up by the pandemic changed the reflection of sport. In this volume, leading scholars consider how those reflections and key communicative interpretations of them played out on the playing fields of sport and American culture.