The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
College football chaos
As the dominoes fall against the nation, bedlam ensues
Donald Trump, noted golfer and WWE Hall of Famer, said Tuesday morning on Fox Sports Radio that it would be a “tragic mistake” if college football wasn’t played this fall.
The Big Ten and the Pac-12 weren’t listening to the Sports Dabbler-InChief.
The two Power Five conferences, as expected, voted later in the day to call off all fall sports because of COVID-19 and will look to play in the spring. Next up the Big 12, considered a swing conference the way Ohio, Michigan, Florida are swing election states, decided Tuesday night in a conference call to continue pursuing playing.
Will the rest of the dominoes not fall now? Will the SEC and ACC stand continue to stand tough and insist on forging ahead with a season. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey sounded confident. Don’t you get the feeling sometimes the SEC motto ought to be, “Live Free or Die Playing Tackle Football.”
At any rate, Dr. Cameron Wolfe, a Duke infectious disease specialist and chairman of the ACC medical advisory group, said much has been learned over the past six months and he believes a fall season can be played safely. Evidently, that’s a big reason they’re still on course to play at Clemson, Florida State, Louisville and all the
way up to Chestnut Hill.
Rebellious football-loving Nebraska? Coach Scott Frost, President Ted Carter, and Chancellor Ronnie Green released a joint statement after the Big Ten vote saying they hope the Huskers can still compete this fall. What league? As an independent? They’re not playing UMass, because the Minutemen joined UConn and the Mid-American and Mountain West conferences in dropping their season.
American Athletic Conference commissioner Mike Aresco, meanwhile, said his league is pushing ahead with its season, believes athletes — for a variety of reasons — likely would be worse off if they didn’t play and, of course, the AAC deserves to be in the room with the Power Five. Presumably that’s so they can all wear a mask … to hold up Aresco and continue to take millions of TV revenue the Group of Five deserve.
On Aug. 11, less than a month before scheduled openers, 53 of 130 FBS schools have announced they aren’t playing. That leaves 77 who are. Everything is spinning wildly.
Not to mention there are no guarantees they’ll be able to play in the spring.
If this all sounds like chaos to you, bingo!
The NCAA is powerless in FBS football. Conferences are free to make their own multibillion-dollar broadcast deals. The tribal barons who run the sport have no centralized leadership, nor any inclination to serve anyone beyond themselves. So yes, a portion of college football could limp into the schedule, frazzled, ripped at the seams and snarling at each other.
And yes, if major college football ultimately finds some accidental unity and calls off the season as it should have done a month ago, the NFL will be only too happy to play games on Friday night and Saturday to spread out its product and increase its broadcast ratings. Did I mention that this is all about money? Duh. The Ivy League, which plays a different game than the Power Five and NFL, knew what it was doing on July 8 when it once again led the way and called off fall sports. The Ivies showed their expertise and moral compass in March when they were the first to stop sports because of the pandemic.
I just don’t understand the people who insist that sports media members who argue that a 2020 football season is a bad idea are somehow happy when games are canceled. It’s not often that I get to write pshaw, but pshaw! Canceled sports seasons are awful. People paid to cover the games, who love athletics yet write what they believe to be the truth, have been furloughed and lost jobs. Look, you are allowed to be heartbroken that your alma mater isn’t playing without throwing rocks at the messenger.
The vital message remains the same six months into this plague: Social distance. Wear a mask. Don’t be stupid. For all the college football zealots who are yelling now about doing the right thing and following protocol so the season can take place, why the hell weren’t many of you doing it in March and April, or even later in allowing COVID to spike in many states? There’s a chance we could have had a complete college football season, Bucko.
Instead, we have division.
As Steve Politi, sports columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, pointed out, college football is the one place where a school president, professor of microbiology/immunology, and an internist who has authored 100 scientific papers (Michigan’s Mark Schlissel) would take a backseat to an expert like his coach. Jim Harbaugh said he wasn’t advocating for football to continue because of his or his players’ desire, but because he had the facts. Over eight weeks, only 11 of 893 COVID tests on his program had been positive and none of the past 353. He doesn’t mention other schools that haven’t been nearly as fortunate.
This is from an expert, Politi pointed out, who once told a player not to eat chicken because it’s a “nervous bird,” and said he takes a daily vitamin called “steak.” Sit down, Fauci. Experts like Harbaugh, Frost, Penn State’s James Franklin and Ohio State’s Ryan Day can run this COVID racket.
We know younger people are much less likely to die than older, at-risk folks. We also know young people will not be as careful and will spread the disease. Now there comes growing evidence that the disease is linked to myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle that can damage younger adults. Myocarditis put Red Sox starting pitcher Eduardo
Rodriguez out for the season and has been found in at least a handful of Big Ten athletes.
“We are in the middle of a public health crisis first and foremost,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) in a release. “Until President Trump starts taking that seriously, we are going to keep seeing consequences like the postponement of college football.
“I want to be able to watch college sports this year as much as anyone, but it’s unacceptable to expect athletes to put their futures on the line for no compensation and without the necessary protections for their health and safety. Universities and conferences are coming to that hard realization. … Right now, college players are using their collective bargaining power to call for reasonable demands.”
From the chaos caused by COVID-19, we have seen athletes from the Pac-12 and Big Ten band together with new-found power to challenge the college football and NCAA establishment. Some revenuesharing demands, for instance, are a reach too far at this point, but there’s no doubt their list has merit. Murphy, a leader in college reform, listed universal health and safety precautions, the ability to opt out without losing eligibility and the ability to form a players’ association.
“If we want college sports to continue, conferences, coaches and universities should take them seriously,” Murphy said.
Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence has led his own movement on social media. #WeWantToPlay is further proof that athletes, during a year when COVID has left college athletics in disarray, can find a powerful collective voice. Powerful enough for Trump to Tweet on Monday: “The studentathletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled. #WeWantToPlay.”
The Sports Dabbler-inChief should be more concerned with the reasons all those hard-working, unpaid athletes won’t be able to play. Why six months into this, there wasn’t an organized way to combat and contain the plague. And why some in power are determining it is safe and others aren’t.
College football? A multibillion-dollar microcosm of the national chaos.