General

Swine Flu: Rising in the Polls

Sep 21, 2009, 4:30 PM UTC

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In a year with no best team in college football, if an entity exists that can beat some of the better teams in the country, it should logically be seriously considered a national championship contender. So, out of respect to parity and paranoia, let’s consider voting for something even Urban Meyer can’t adequately scheme for: Swine flu.â†µâ†µâ‡¥“It is a panic level of proportion I’ve never seen before,” Meyer said on Sunday. “That’s coming from me. You hear about, I think, Wisconsin had 40 players. Ole Miss had 20 players. My wife [a nurse who teaches at UF], with her great insight, said, ‘Do you realize the Swine Flu and everything is hitting the Florida campus,’ last week.”â†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥“My gosh. Our training staff and doctors are attacking this has hard as we can. That Purell (a hand sanitizer) stuff’s everywhere. You can’t walk down the hallway without everybody telling you to do this, do this. We’re trying the best we can, but it’s real.”â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µMeyer, by way of excusing Florida’s lackluster 23-13 win over that other real foe this weekend, said that a number of Gators were dealing with the flu. Tight end Aaron Hernandez, defensive end Jermaine Cunningham, and running back Jeff Demps were “isolated” in the days leading up to the game, and Demps, who ran for 31 yards and a touchdown against Tennessee, had a 101-degree temperature on Saturday. “If it’s anybody other than Jeff Demps,” Meyer said, “they said he probably couldn’t function.”â†µ

â†µâ†µSo what happens when a player legitimately can’t?â†µ

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â†µFlu outbreaks have already limited Ole Miss and Wisconsin, and with this H1N1 strain of influenza hitting young people especially hard, it's not a stretch to expect more cases reported this fall from football teams. But the real danger might be in a coach's catch-22. â†µ

â†µâ†µHow does a coach justify putting pads on a player with flu-like symptoms if the player performs poorly? And how would a coach explain holding out a player for medical reasons if his team gets shellacked? And what if the coach himself falls ill? And what if it’s just the regular old flu, not H1N1, after all? Is Pedialyte the answer?â†µ

â†µâ†µIf teams are weighing following CDC guidelines and protecting players’ health against throwing ailing stars on the field for a chance at BCS riches, then swine flu may be the biggest darkhorse of this fall.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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