Article on conferences that decided to play

TheColonyEagle · August 19, 2020

https://www.al.com/alabamafootball/2020/08/how-a-cardiologist-may-have-saved-the-college-football-season.html

The Minnesota-based cardiologist leads the Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Lab which studies, among other things, sudden death in young athletes. He explained to the Big 12′s leaders that a new myocarditis study in the Journal of American Medical Association that sparked panic across college sports didn’t have the “bandwidth” to be transferable in a useful way. The study, conducted in Germany and composed of middle-aged adults, found that 78 percent of the 100 participants had some cardiac abnormality. Ackerman said it’d be a “scientific foul” to infer that those findings are relevant for 18 to 24-year old athletes.

"You cannot make that leap," Ackerman exclaimed.

He used a soup analogy to explain how to weigh myocarditis, among other COVID-19 related issues, in whether to play football this fall. The conferences that canceled their seasons, he explained, stirred myocarditis in as a primary ingredient into their soup and then declared the soup tasted bad. Ackerman advised the Big 12 and Conference USA leaders to take myocarditis out of that equation, and if they still felt like the soup tasted bad, then that was their reason to cancel.