Syracuse, N.Y. — As sports across the globe continue their stutter step back to existence, colleges are now determining how and if they can hold sporting events during a pandemic that shows no signs of abating.

How realistic is the return of college sports this fall? If you ask The Basketball Tournament founder Jon Mugar and Johns Hopkins public health expert Tara Kirk Sell, the challenge of playing sports, particularly contact sports, is “tricky” without frequent testing, quick results and a quarantine.

“The conclusion we drew and we came to it pretty early,” Mugar said, “is that testing alone doesn’t help much at all. There has to be a controlled environment that you’re testing into. So for us, testing was simply a gateway to get into a world where everyone was wearing masks and everyone was social distancing and only hanging out with their group.”

Mugar and Sell collaborated to bring the $1 million winner-take-all basketball tournament to fruition this summer. TBT limited its field to 24 teams, selected four replacement teams in case any of those 24 teams tested positive for Covid-19 (they did) and crowned a champion Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio.

They did it with frequent Covid testing and a strict quarantine. Players and coaches, essentially, were locked into their hotel rooms for the duration of their time in Columbus, their only escapes for team practices, games or meetings in specified team rooms.

As colleges wade through the precautions they need to take to play sports this fall, Mugar and Sell see a minefield of potential problems.

The primary issue? How to keep athletes and coaches safe and Covid-free without quarantining them from the rest of the student population.

“I think it requires a quarantine,” Sell said.

Already, a multitude of college athletic programs have announced positive tests that have slowed or temporarily shut down training programs. And those results came with no students on campus.

College coaches and administrators can strongly urge their athletes to stay within small social circles, to wear masks, to be as careful as they can to avoid contracting the virus. Jim Boeheim said he and his staff are doing just that with their players. And maybe, in the weeks leading to the return of the rest of the student body and the resumption of classes, that might work. Positive cases can be isolated and treated without much disruption to the rest of the team.

But what happens when students arrive on campus? What happens when athletes interact with students who are behaving like college students, whether in the classroom, the local Starbucks or their student housing?

“Players have to be committed to keeping their contacts outside their team very low,” Sell said. “The current surge of Covid-19 in young people right now has shown that that’s a difficult ask. I do think athletic teams have a lot of control over their athletes, but athletes have to understand it and take appropriate risks.

“We also need to have, beyond that, really rapid turnaround testing that provides us with high-quality tests and right now in a lot of places that’s not happening. We need those tests within 24 hours.”

Even with frequent and rapid testing, problems lurk. There is no uniform NCAA policy about testing. Conferences can dictate terms for their own teams; the American Athletic Conference issued testing guidelines Thursday morning and the ACC and other Power Five leagues could release their own policies soon. But playing games outside a conference requires deep faith and a roll of the dice.

Testing alone, Mugar and Sell said, won’t eliminate a potential team outbreak. Mugar cited the situation in Fort Benning, Georgia. When Army recruits reported to the base, all 640 tested negative for Covid-19. A week later, 142 of those recruits tested positive.

“A single test is purely theater and not really useful at all,” Mugar said. “And then you start to think, well, what if you tested every other day? Well, yeah, you’re gonna pick up more people but what’s more important is what people are doing in the day between that Day 1 and Day 3 test. The behavior becomes absolutely essential.”

A quarantine would theoretically restrict behavior, but that won’t happen in college sports. Athletic programs can’t separate, say, their football players from the rest of the student body without refuting the NCAA’s core mantra that football players are simply students who happen to play sports. They can’t create a sports bubble without a similar strategy to protect all students.

In the absence of a bubble, Mugar and Sell predict a rocky road for the return of college sports.

Sell was an accomplished swimmer at Stanford and won a silver medal in the 2004 Olympics. She suspects it might be feasible to conduct college sports such as swimming and running without quarantining athletes.

“But with football or basketball, you really need a bubble,” she said. “Because you’re having a lot of contact with the other team and I think teams rightly should be concerned with what’s going on on the other side of the ball. Are they taking care of themselves so that we don’t have problems down the line because of someone’s lack of responsibility?”

READ MORE: How TBT pulled off a successful basketball tournament during a raging coronavirus pandemic

Donna Ditota is a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and syracuse.com. Got a comment or idea for a story? Reach her at dditota@syracuse.com.