After a difficult year disrupted by stringent restrictions and ever-changing protocols, the promise of a college football season largely unburdened by the pandemic was a powerful incentive as USC urged its football players to get the COVID-19 vaccine this summer.
The message during USC’s vaccination drive was clear: Getting the vaccine was the first step in clearing a path back to normalcy on campus and in college athletics. For vaccinated athletes, there would be no surveillance testing, no masking, no quarantining. Only the unvaccinated would be forced to relive the frustrating realities of the 2020 season, when one positive test could send a program into a spiral.