As more and more university presidents finish categories in person this fall due to the uncontrollable spread of COVID-19, it would be one of the euphemisms of all time to say that the leadership of school football changes the goals of the opportunity to interpret normal academics on premises.
Metaphorically, of course, the replacement in sentiment would be more like the fact that the Fairmount Hotel’s 3.2 million pounds were dragged from one end of downtown San Antonio to the other in 1985, an impressive task that requires an act of religion that would. No. the Market Street Bridge collapses.
The hotel came to the other side. College football officers are only hoping to turn themselves in next week. And they hope that the hypocrisy of what they hope to achieve passes unnoticed or forgiven as the reality of the worst-case scenario on college campuses.
“Now you can see writing on the wall,” said Donna Lopiano, former director of women’s athletics in Texas and current chairman of Drake Group, a nonprofit organization whose project is to protect educational integrity in higher education. “It’s embarrassing. It’s just embarrassing.”
North Carolina tried a week of categories in person before deciding it wouldn’t work. Notre Dame becomes virtual for two weeks, as an increase in positive cases gave the impression about a week after academics moved in. More universities inevitably target the same destination.
Still, school football is still on track to begin in a few weeks at six of the 10 meetings of the Football Bowl subdivision with a new topic of conversation attached: it is safer for football if normal students have been sent home.
“It’s helping us create greater rigidity around the program and a bigger bubble,” Said North Carolina coach Mack Brown.
He’s not wrong. If a university’s most sensible priority is to play a football season under existing conditions, its most productive possibility, the only chance, is to kidnap the football players of their classmates for the next 4 months.
But that’s not what the school’s athletics officers sang several months ago. Not even close.
In fact, after a call in mid-April between the school’s football playoff guidance committee and Vice President Mike Pence, the coordinated message from the convention commissioners was diametrically opposed.
“If everything is virtual and you can’t have young people on campus, can you justify the dangers of having athletes on campus?” American Athletics Conference commissioner Mike Aresco said at the time.
Bob Bowlsby, Commissioner of Big 12, on the radio screen of Golic and Wingo: “The consultation was made at some point, you can play football if the school is not in session, and I think the answer is no. They are student-athletes who are there for a schooling and are unlikely to happen. If e-learning becomes the currency of the realm and if it can be implemented satisfactorily, I think it is theoretically conceivable that there may possibly be contests. But if it’s not safe for enthusiasts to be in the stands, you have to wonder if it’s really safe for other young people to hit each other’s heads and get close to each other.”
And here’s SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey at Knoxville’s WNML radio station: “I think fundamentally, activity on our campuses is one of the steps we’ll take to bring back school football, school football, school volleyball or anything else.”
And NCAA President Mark Emmert said May 8 that in Division I, “All the commissioners and presidents I’ve spoken to obviously agree: if you don’t have academics on campus, you don’t have student-athletes on campus.
“This does not mean that you will have to be operational in the full overall model, however, you will have to treat the physical condition and well-being of athletes at least as much as normal students. Therefore, if a school does not reopen, it should probably not play sports. It’s that simple.”
Going from where we are now would be a simple intellectual obstacle to success if school presidents and athletic directors simply admitted to running professional sports organizations within the universities that host them and that it is more an obligation to provide television content through sport. the institution’s activity and its reputation as a valid learning experience.
But they probably wouldn’t admit it. They will simply let other people perceive it for themselves and hope that there will be no consequences on the other aspect of the courts or Congress, anyone who has put the full concept of amateurism in their crosshairs.
“This raises a number of questions about why football players are on campus but not chemistry academics and why this time we treat athletes who are not athletes,” said Gabe Feldman, director of Tulane’s sports law program.
“It’s smart if you say that some student activities are more essential than others, but when you say that school football is the only one more essential than others, it’s a harder argument to accept. If I were a school, I’d say we’d meet our football and chemistry students.
“The argument that school football players are safer on campus would possibly be fair, but any organization of a hundred academics would be safer on campus if no one else on campus if they could also be evaluated all the time and be in their own bubble.
But school football has great merit in this debate: most people who buy tickets and watch games on TV don’t care if it requires a level of hypocrisy to justify that football players are attached to a bubble on campus while other students. they’re not.
They only need a season. And, of course, players need to play. So, if this happens as the main negative consequences of COVID-19, it’s a victory for everyone, to hell with the optics.
“But no one asks the broader question: we bring athletes when there is no rotation test, when you have part of the population in the houses and you know that schoolchildren are not cloistered.” Lopiano says. “Even though they were limited to their bedrooms, what do we know about dormitories and retirement homes? What are we doing here? That’s crazy.”
It would possibly be crazy, but college athletics is used to operating in the grey zone between reality and fantasy, between the moral contradictions that underlie the total formula and a voracious fan base that doesn’t care.
So, at the end of the day, the explanation of why the SEC, CCA, and The Big 12 continue to plan football seasons as campuses struggle to stay open doesn’t want to be consistent. When you are able to bring a construction to a river, the only justification you want is that it can be done.
Follow USA TODAY sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken