Marc Weiszer wrote a piece last week about season ticket renewals during these times, and I was happy to contribute my perspective. I was surprised to see renewal rates so high, and I expect Greg McGarity is also (pleasantly so). As I shared with Weiszer, our decision to go ahead and renew came down to a couple of points:

• We considered ordering tickets as a moderate-risk bet that there would be football this fall.
• The possibility of a refund if the season were canceled (or played without fans) lessened the risk.
• We like our location(s) in the stadium and didn’t want to be displaced after 20+ years.
• We are grateful to be able to place that kind of a bet right now.

The last point is difficult – I know so many are struggling right now either with immediate needs or with crippling uncertainty hanging over them. That renders any other consideration meaningless. Georgia has been flexible with dates and payment options, but in the end season tickets are an expense that’s suddenly become an extravagance for many people. Even if the season is canceled and refunds issued, many can’t tie up money for that long.

There’s one scenario for which we had to accept some risk: what if they decide to open the stadiums and we aren’t comfortable returning?

There’s no question that things are going to be muddy for a while even after this first wave of infection passes. There will be no clean break and no “over”. Until there is a vaccine, the job will be playing whack-a-mole against isolated outbreaks of an easily-transmitted virus. Meanwhile, much of the nation is under intense pressure to reopen. Sports will be a big part of that reopening. There’s a symbolism to the return of sports, but there are also real financial considerations. We’ve seen the panic of schools faced with the loss of the football season that funds the whole operation. We’ve heard about the campaigns to support arena and stadium staff. We know what kind of economic impact sports has on small towns like Athens.

I don’t suggest (Mike Gundy aside) that leagues would willingly put athletes or fans at risk, but their standards and risk aversion will necessarily be colored by the pressures they face to play ball. Gabe DeArmond pointed out that it’s not news that coaches want to play. It will be news when someone with a financial stake in the game says that we shouldn’t play. Blutarsky recently touched on a question I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks. Coaches and administrators want business as usual – or at least to get back out there as soon as possible. Fans sorely miss sports. The real question though is much more personal: when will you be comfortable being packed shoulder-to-shoulder with 92,000 random fans who have traveled in from across the southeast?

The change of the past month has been swift. In early March, I was sat among fans from Tennessee to South Carolina to Mississippi at the SEC women’s basketball tournament. Sure, we knew to wash hands a little more carefully and be suspicious of coughs and fevers, but the games went on. A little over a month ago Georgia played a men’s basketball game in Nashville. It all ended abruptly that week: first the NBA pulled the plug. (Rudy Gobert was irresponsible, but how many lives did his recklessness indirectly save?) College conference tournaments began postponing and then finally cancelling games. The NCAA tournament wasn’t going to take place. Within a week the SEC had ended spring sports. Now we’re separated from friends and loved ones, and a simple trip to the grocery store is fraught with peril. That’s a severe and sudden psychological and behavioral shock, and it’s not easily reversed.

I told Weiszer that I wouldn’t attend games under current conditions. That implies limited testing and an unproven toolkit of therapeutic responses. The hope (and the assumption) is that we’ll be working under a different paradigm later this year. That means more widespread testing to identify and contain outbreaks, contact tracing, and more proven therapeutics that will reduce the risk of mortality or even severe illness for those who are infected. Most every plan forward outlines those elements as requirements along the long road from shelter-in-place to a vaccine. The extent and effectiveness of those remedies will determine which pieces of society can safely resume and at what level.

The “how” of sports returning doesn’t concern me so much. It’s something I’d like to see very much, but it’s not really under my control. Whether it’s an abbreviated schedule, a delayed start, a season without fans in the stands – those are all just ideas based on our current understanding of how things might work. It’s good to think about those things now, and you’d expect any decent organization to have an array of plans available in order to be flexible when the time comes to reopen. Certain administrators and pundits have taken heat for pessimism about playing this year, but a lost year is a possibility that can’t catch anyone off-guard. Time (and the virus) will help to instruct us about under which circumstances sports may return. The same applies to travel, retail, tourism, entertainment – any activity that brings people into shared spaces.

What I can control is my participation. That’s the agency any of us has in whatever comes next. You’ve likely seen the survey that found that over 60% of fans wouldn’t be comfortable returning to the stands until a vaccine is available. It’s possible that many respondents were spooked by the sudden onset of the pandemic and might moderate their views as time goes on. It’s still very likely that fans will be slow to return in person even as games get underway. I expect we’ll see the same in other areas of life as things are allowed to reopen.

Public health regulations might allow games to occur. Students might return to campus, and other necessary conditions might be met. Each of us will still have our say in whether we feel safe enough to attend. At most I’ll lose the cost of a ticket. It would hurt to miss something I love dearly. Fortunately I don’t have to make that decision right now. As Weiszer writes, we’ll “now have the months ahead to see what a Bulldogs football season might look like in 2020.” It’s foolish now to make forecasts whether or not there will be a football season and what form it might take. Renewing season tickets now bought me time to watch and wait and make a more informed decision months from now. I hope progress is such that there’s an easy decision to make.