PAC-12, BIG TEN SAY NO WE CAN’T!
POSTPONE COLLEGE FOOTBALL SEASON AMID COVID CRISIS
The Big Ten and Pac-12 officially called off their fall football seasons, hoping they’ll be able to play in the spring.
The conferences hopes to wait out the pandemic, but it creates an entirely new issue to grapple with: the feasibility of playing football in the spring before quickly gearing up for a 2021 season in the fall.
It’s hypocritical of these schools to say that they’re postponing fall sports due to the health and safety of their athletes, while also asking them to punish their bodies by playing two football seasons in one year. Keep your eyes on the prize: spring football is obviously more about collecting these lost dollars from a fall with no sports.
If these major sports conferences truly put the well-being of their athletes above all else, the idea of playing sports during a pandemic would never have been considered. We wouldn’t even be in a situation where players stepped foot on campus during the summer as coronavirus outbreaks hit various schools.
Playing two football seasons in such a short amount of time presents a different danger. Football is an inherently dangerous game. Most doctors would agree that large human beings running into each other repeatedly at high rates of speed is not good for the human body.
The truth is, we don’t know the correct amount of time that a person needs to recover from a football game. There’s been an arbitrary mark of one week between football games and roughly seven months between the end of one season and the start of another.
Compressing another season into the time frame of the normal offseason likely isn’t an experiment worth exploring, especially as the push for a college football players’ association gains momentum. If football is such a valuable entity that the season can’t be canceled and instead must be postponed to the point that unpaid college football players will be asked to play two entire football seasons in 2021, then the argument for allowing those players to have a slice of revenues only grows stronger.
If the NCAA is unwilling to budge on some of the financial demands of players, why should potential high draft picks play in a spring league? Highly touted NFL draft prospects probably won’t play spring football anyway, but that decision is only made easier if they aren’t being paid.
Depending on when this spring league is supposed to take place, they might have to negotiate with the NFL on pushing back the start of the draft, which usually takes place in late April. Pushing the draft back would, in turn, affect the NFL’s offseason plans and accelerate the learning process for the 2021 rookie class.
There’s also the very real possibility that the United States will still be struggling with the pandemic. It’s not a problem that can be solved today, but the country still has major work to do before the climate for spring football is safe enough.