Florida State player details battle with coronavirus
Earlier this week, Mike Gundy went viral for all the wrong reasons when he opined that, among other reasons, Oklahoma State players could play football without students on campus or fans in the stands because college football players are, by definition, all young and healthy.
“We get people that get the flu during the season, we quarantine them, we treat them, we make sure they’re healthy, we bring ’em back,” Gundy said. “It would be the same thing here, but at some point, we’ve got to go back to work. We’ve got to get these guys back in here.
“From what I read, the healthy people can fight this, the antibodies make it better. They’re doing some blood transplants now with the people that have already gotten the disease, that have gotten over it that have the antibodies that can fight it. There’s a lot of people who can figure this out. May 1’s our goal. Don’t know if it will happen. Players will come in after that.”
He continued: "In my opinion, we need to bring our players back. They are 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 years old and they are healthy and they have the ability to fight this virus off."
Andrew Boselli would beg to differ.
Boselli is 22 years old. He stands 6-foot-5 and weighs a robust 321 pounds. He plays center at Florida State, and he battled coronavirus.
In an essay released Friday morning on Seminoles.com, Boselli detailed his battle with COVID-19:
I woke up on a Sunday morning with a low-grade fever, thinking that would be the worst of it.
By that night, my temperature was 103 degrees. It was the highest fever of my life, but I felt like I was freezing.
I was glued to the couch with no energy, no appetite and nothing but fluids and over-the-counter medicines to help me feel better.
The hardest part was feeling slightly short of breath. That’s a bad feeling anyway, and knowing that shortness of breath is often a symptom of severe cases made it that much worse.
I had never felt so not like myself.
Boselli says he dealt with a "mild" case of the virus, and his symptoms were mostly gone after three days. His father, former Jaguars and Texans offensive tackle Tony Boselli, spent days in the ICU before being discharged. He is 47, not 97.
Obviously, no coach wants their player to go through a bout anything close to what the Boselli family battled. Everyone wants this virus behind us and to get back to normal life as soon as possible.
But it's an illustrative case why administrators and health officials are operating with such caution. Imagine if Andrew Boselli contracted COVID-19 in September, not March. You can forget about him playing that weekend and, with studies revealing carriers can "shed" the virus for five days before symptoms appear (if they ever do at all), it's easy to see how one infection can quickly overwhelm a locker room.
Again, we all want to beat this virus. The way to do that is to stay home in the spring so we can (hopefully) go out in the fall.
