Trust me, this is not as easy as it sounds. You have some students who work during the class period and will complain about that. Oh sure, you can make a class schedule and if it is face-to-face you are supposed to be there. However, when the pandemic hit, students went home and got jobs and that really messed up a schedule. Faculty had to switch around class times so that the students could meet. Like you expect the professor to be teaching 24/7? No way. When it says online, it means that the professor can establish the times that he/she demands OR they can be diplomatic and try to get a class time that fits for all the students (like herding cats in my opinion). Online classes are listed as Online and not given a class time schedule such as Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11:00 to 11:50. Such blows the whole concept of online distance delivery based on the paradigm of "go to school at your pace and on your schedule." And if I am a professor and I have a set time to meet in the classroom I am not going to look to kindly to the person who gives the excuse of "I cannot make it, I have football practice; can I just do all my stuff online?" And there are professors who use the zoom attendance as part of the grade. Now, take all this information and couple it with the student-athlete that has a 15, or 16 or 17 or 18 hour schedule. Not all classes are created equal and not all of them are your typical 3 hour classes. Some classes could be a four hours with a separate lab component that is built into it that meets at another time. Here is an example: Biology 186 Principles of Biological Systems 1. This class meets MWF from 11:00 to 11:50; the lab portion is a one hour component to supplement the class; it meets on Tuesday from 1:30 to 3:15.
Oh but the professor can meet with the student individually....sorry, that's called an independent study and no professor is going to do more than they have to.
Oh but the professor can have a zoom and do a 50 minute class and simply meet for a 25 minutes to accommodate the football players....sorry, there are accreditation standards that strongly suggest that classes are to meet for the full time period and meet the prescribed "minutes";
Oh but the professor has academic freedom.....not until their Dean finds out what they are doing. No professor wants to have to explain themselves.
Now, if the class is hybrid and let's say a class is to meet on Monday and Wednesday, but one half meets on Monday face to face and the other half meets on Wednesday you still have the aspect of being exposed to the general student population. If the class is completely online, you are going to have problems in scheduling a class time where all the students can meet for the Zoom at the same time.
And you cannot simply have classes set aside for "just the football team" unless you have a cohort model but even this get's difficult at times as the student has a major and there are not multiple sections of an upper level course.
Now, does this sound like this is "easier"? It is a logistical nightmare.
For the community college I do some part time teaching for we had the choice of going to "remote" learning vs "online" learning when we made the conversion in mid-March. The difference being that remote learning is like the distance learning of old - when it was via VTC (which UNL was a pioneer in back in the 80s) - meaning you had class at a certain time, just not in person. The VTC model was more like students at a remote site going to a classroom with VTC and seeing a lecture taking place elsewhere, but with Zoom/Skype/etc. this morphed into sitting at home. So for a remote class, the expectation was that learning would be in real time.
I chose a sort of combination approach - I was available to all my students during the normal class times and did lectures that way. However, I also made all the lecture notes available to any students that could no longer make that class time and recorded my lectures as well for them to download.
I did this due to what you said about schedules changing due to the impact of coronavirus - they might be stuck working where they didn't have to before, they might not have good enough high speed internet at home, they might have to share computing resources with others and not be able to meet at that time, etc. So attendance was voluntary, but it gave those that could make it a chance to have direct interaction with me as I went through the material, while still allowing those that couldn't a chance to still send emails, etc. with questions after they looked at the material. I also set up some online office hours and tried to be flexible so that students could drop in and ask questions. It was very tiring. I mainly did this since the students did not sign up for a remote learning environment when the semester started, so I felt I had to be as flexible as possible to help them out.
For the fall, my campus is still closed (except for some rare exceptions - Biology and Chemistry Labs, some Nursing courses, etc.). So I will teach in a remote paradigm for the fall, where we meet to conduct the class during the scheduled class time. Since the class is listed that way in the course catalog, the expectation is that they understand what they are signing up for. I think if you set it up that way it is no different than them taking a class on campus at a certain time. Yeah, they can have computer problems, but they shouldn't be any higher than the obligatory "my car broke down/was in an accident/got called in for an extra shift at work/etc." that I've heard from students in previous years for standard face to face courses.
But, for K-12, this is a much more difficult scenario.
So I don't see impact on football players any more than with their normal course load - they have been obligated to meet at a certain place and time before, now just a certain time via virtual means. Agree though that hybrid type meetings will greatly increase infection probabilities. Further reading about what happened with the Marlins seems to indicate they probably got community spread due to high counts in Miami. The same thing would probably happen to players going to class.
The result is probably not appetizing to most of the players - living in a bubble for the fall semester - no going to class, no hanging out with friends (except for teammates), no partying, etc. As a much older person, I don't see it as a big sacrifice (I don't have much of a social life anyway :lol: ) but I assume 18-23 year olds might have a different opinion.
As you and many others have said - that will probably kill the season.
