The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Sports Wednesday, December 2, 2020 — 17 Michigan football coaches need to wear their masks correctly As of Monday, there have been well over 13 million COVID-19 cases and more than 265,000 deaths in the United States. In the state of Michigan alone, there have been over 350,000 cases and more than 9,000 deaths. Regardless, a football season is being played at Michigan — for now. The Big Ten joined the rest of college football in November, stumbling its way through the pandemic season. So far, 108 games have been cancelled or postponed. All these protocols and facts Harbaugh praised worked out for Michigan, until the team paused all in-person activities on Monday after multiple presumptive positive tests inside the program. The results are now undergoing confirmatory PCR testing. That’s not too surprising, though. COVID-19 is not something to be played around with. Yet, it is treated as such every Saturday on Michigan’s sideline and others around the country. Coaches constantly remove their masks or face coverings to talk to referees, their coaching staffs and players. In other cases, masks will just lazily dangle below their noses. Masks are not effective unless they cover up the mouth and nose, preventing any respiratory droplets from spreading. People release particles into the air by breathing, coughing and even talking. And yet, coaches remove their masks when they talk, letting their germs roam free. They can put their mask back on right after but the damage has already been done. Infections can be dramatically decreased by just covering up your face, even if it is for a few minutes. It’s all about limiting others’ exposure to the virus if someone is infected. While it may be a charade for coaches and benched players to wear masks during games, the sentiment is still very important and it could still save people from getting sick. There are bound to be dozens of times throughout the week when masks are improperly worn during practices and in locker rooms — a problem unto itself. But, the least they could do is just wear them properly for four hours during games. Unfortunately, that is just too tall of a request for Michigan’s coaches. Harbaugh is not the only perpetrator but his shortcomings are fairly noticeable. He wears two face coverings during games — one normally then another over his headset. But, throughout the game, both seem to disappear off his face at times. By now, millions know about Harbaugh’s duck-billed mask. What does it actually accomplish? The short answer is nothing. Masks have to cover the mouth and nose to catch those droplets. It will be pretty hard to do that when a microphone is keeping it from sealing his face. Harbaugh’s failure directly contradicts his logic of being safe. “Wearing the mask pretty much at all times. I use a double mask during the game,” Harbaugh said. Maybe the idea gets lost in the intensity of the game. But how can you spend months bragging about your program’s protocols when you yourself fail to comply with a simple mask mandate? “Everybody’s tested daily. We’ve been tested four times since Friday and every day before that,” Harbaugh said. “So you’re saying during the game, that’s considered to be a clean field. Even if they’re a presumptive positive the day before the game, night before the game, they’re not allowed to play, which we’ve had, too.” There’s a lot of backwards logic in there. Testing is effective in tracking the virus but it does just that. All a test does is tell a person if they are infected or not at that moment. They do not cure the disease or stop the spread. COVID-19 can take days to incubate in someone’s body, so a person can be negative one day and positive a few days later. Harbaugh seems to think he is living in a utopia where a negative means the individual is immune for that day and is good to go. You’d think that five canceled or postponed games and counting in the Big Ten alone — where all teams are tested daily — would alert him to the flaws in that logic. Precautions are still necessary even if the entire team is tested multiple times. The best way to prevent the spread is still by wearing a mask. So what does the team still need to do on the sideline and in the locker room? Wear a mask. Regardless of Harbaugh’s rationale, it is a problem. And Harbaugh does not deserve to be singled out because he is not the only coach at Michigan or in college football to fail to wear a mask correctly. But, he is in the spotlight as a big-time college football coach at a major university. Millions tune in on Saturdays and he should be setting a better example for those at home. Eight months into a pandemic that is killing and hospitalizing hundreds of thousands, millions are still failing to don masks appropriately and listen to medical professionals; wearing a mask is not something that can be messed around with. College coaches need to be setting a better example for everybody. They have a huge responsibility to wear masks properly, whether they asked for it or not. Harbaugh agreed to a seven- year $52 million contract with the University of Michigan to be their head coach. As a former player at Michigan, he knew what was going to be asked of him, whether it was producing a good product on the field or being the face of the university. Harbaugh accepted the responsibility and now must confront his shortcomings. Michigan athletics has good COVID-19 protocols and testing in place. But, as revealed Monday, that only does so much. Harbaugh had been very good about making his team wear masks. But at least on the sidelines, he and his staff obviously failed. It’s impossible to know whether the lack of mask- wearing on the sideline Saturday contributed to cases within the program, but it certainly didn’t help. Watching Harbaugh march up and down the sideline, failing to comply with his own rules and expectations is an embarrassment. Harbaugh begged for a season amidst a global health crisis. Now he needs to face the music and listen to what the doctors have been saying for months. As the season stands on the brink of cancellation, the least he could do is try. Trachtenberg can be reached at btrach@umich.edu and on Twitter @brandon_trach1. BRANDON TRACHTENBERG Daily Sports Writer ALEC COHEN/Daily Michigan Football coach Jim Harbaugh’s incorrect mask-wearing brings the shortcomings of pandemic prevention plans into clear focus. The Wolverines aren’t excited about Michigan football either A.J. Henning stopped in his tracks, spotting the underthrown ball from Cade McNamara and pulled up. He stuck his hands out and leapt, stretching over the defender and bringing the ball in as he came down. The third-quarter play gained 28 yards, got the Wolverines into Penn State territo- ry and set up a Hassan Haskins touchdown to cut the deficit to just three points a few minutes later. It was one of the rare high- lights of the game for Michigan on Saturday. And on Michigan’s bench, a Daily reporter spotted Jim Har- baugh telling his players to get up and cheer. If there’s a single moment that captures the Wolverines’ season from hell, that’s it. Not the emo- tion on display when an overtime Rutgers field-goal attempt went wide. Not a loss to a rebuilding Michigan State program that gifted seven turnovers and the Scarlet Knights’ first Big Ten win in three years the week earlier. Not getting run off the field by Wisconsin and not a three-de- cade win streak getting trampled over against Indiana. No, this takes the top spot. The head football coach at an iconic football school needing to prod his players to stand up and cheer as if it was Little League. How utterly damning. “Something like that, saying it’s a bad culture, they’re not there every day with us working, grinding, watching film, working out, getting there early, getting treatment,” senior offensive lineman Andrew Stueber said. “So it’s noise that I don’t worry about, that I don’t listen to much. I play for the guys around me and listen to my coaches.” Later, pressed on the culture, he said this: “If the powers that be decide there is a problem, then so be it. … I listen to my coaches, I believe in them.” Steuber’s right that it’s unfair to speculate on what goes on in Schembechler Hall in the middle of each week. We’re not there. We only see the end product. But if the end product is hand- ing a directionless Penn State its first win of the season, with Har- baugh needing to tell his players when to cheer, then something is irreparably wrong. If the preparation was there, Joe Milton wouldn’t have wondered who Michigan State linebacker Antjuan Simmons is. Taylor Upshaw would have had more to say about Penn State running back Keyvon Lee after he ran for 134 yards than, “I’m sure he’s a talented back.” If the culture was there, then Harbaugh wouldn’t have had to do his best Jeb Bush impression in the third quarter on Saturday. The Michigan football pro- gram finds itself in a hard sit- uation. Between injuries and opt-outs, the top-end talent on the roster is all but gone. They’re depending on the remnants of a decimated 2017 class and a thin 2018 class to be the upperclass- men leading the team. They’re subject to intense COVID-19 protocols and — though they haven’t needed to go on pause — offensive line coach Ed Warinner made reference last Wednesday to guys missing time because of contact tracing. That’s all real, and there’s every chance the season would have gone differently if not for a global pandemic out of anyone’s control. But every FBS program in the country is dealing with the same issues on some level. And this season — and all the baggage that came with it — is exactly what Jim Harbaugh very publicly asked for. “We’re gonna be ready to play a game in two weeks,” he said on Sept. 5. “Get the pads on and our guys have trained without a pause since June 15. So that’s our position. We’re ready to play as soon as we possibly can.” He said those words at a protest to which he showed up, marched on the Diag and public- ly went against his boss’s boss, the University president. And for what? “Getting better every day,” Stueber said, when asked what there was left to play for. “Obvi- ously we still have the big team, OSU, at the end of the year. We just need to click on all cylinders and we’re in contention for that game.” Setting aside the almost laugh- able notion that Michigan can compete with Ohio State right now, it’s hard to imagine that University administrators aren’t asking themselves the same question right now. “That’s much more of a med- ical decision and it’s much more of a University responsibility than it is a football coach’s deci- sion” University president Mark Schlissel said in October, when asked about Harbaugh’s antics. “I didn’t play professional football and coach a college team and coach a pro team, and Jim didn’t go to medical school and do a residency and become a licensed physician.” What is he getting out of this arrangement right now? There are no fans in the stands, and it’s hard to imagine there would be many if that were allowed. Nobody is making donations based on a 2-4 trainwreck of a football season. This is another headache in a semester full of them, nothing more. You could say on that day in September that Michigan was motivated to play a season if it got that chance. What exactly happened between then and that moment late in the third quarter on Saturday is hard to say, but it wasn’t anything good. The program looks broken, the players frustrated and tired. There are three games left, and it would be an act of mercy if they could hit fast forward. You’d say the misery reached its bottom on Saturday when Harbaugh needed to tell his players to get up and cheer, but Michigan has shown an uncanny ability to sink to lower and lower depths each week. Lord only knows what the next three games have in store. Sears can be reached at searseth@umich.edu or on Twitter @ethan_sears. ETHAN SEARS ALEC COHEN/Daily Michigan’s freefall season reached a new low on Saturday, falling to a Penn State team which entered the day with an 0-5 record on the year.