In his enthusiasm for bringing school athletes back to campus amid a damaging global pandemic and launching a football season this fall without a genuine reaction to the point of threat they are asking academics to take, organizing other people running athletics university has ignored all the basics in the company he runs.
Athletes paid attention.
Whatever the predicate, convention commissioners and sports administrators are mobilizing toward the optics of school football as COVID-19 devastates the country, no matter how much they need to shift goals to what is right in a college setting, no matter how much they need it. Blaming at the foot of the NCAA without guilt, all concerned sees the truth.
The 2020 school football season will happen as much as possible, as athletics departments want cash and put this burden on the backs of unpaid fans who take on all the dangers to their fitness and inconveniences to their lives without any other incentive to do so.
That’s the truth the players see. This is the moral, moral and practical dilemma that administrators seek to set aside because the monetary imperative weighs on them. And this confluence of cases is the explanation for why cracks are forming at the base of a formula that has discovered sufficient sympathy in the argument that the vast majority of football and basketball fellow athletes get a greater deal than they are worth.
On Sunday morning, an anonymous Pac-12 player organization affiliated with the National Collegiate Players Association announced a list of applications that was also published in The Players Tribune to secure their participation in the football season.
Some of the needs are easier to achieve, such as extended health insurance for players after eligibility, COVID-19 protection criteria accepted through players and monitored through an independent third party, and projects to combat racial injustice. Others will be debatable or simply impossible, especially the call to “distribute 50% of the total income of each convention in a similar way among the athletes of their respective sports”.
Let us leave for later the debate on the merits or monetary ramifications of this factor and put it in the context of other occasions in the country.
On Saturday, the Washington Post published an article in which the contents of a call between more than a dozen SEC football players and convention officials were recorded and leaked to the newspaper. Among the revelations in this call, the fact that the league’s fitness experts stated that they were unsure of the long-term ramifications of the COVID-19 contraction, that the league stated that it expected positive instances in each of the SEC teams, and that the biggest risk for their season would arise if normal academics did not act responsibly and contribute to campus epidemics.
The answers were so unsatisfactory that at one point, according to the Post, Texas AM supporter Keith Magee II said he “isn’t smart enough” and that “with all this uncertainty, all these things still circulating in the air, everyone knows that yet, some of us scratch our heads.
The SEC responded in large part to the story by complaining that the assembly had leaked as it pledged to “support the fitness of SEC students-athletes,” while Commissioner Greg Sankey turned to Twitter to point out that the players thanked him for receiving the call.
But it’s transparent that those public comments are negative for the SEC because they’ve left a hole in the long-standing public position that, regardless of anything else, their players would be better on campus than at home.
Sankey said that in a recent interview with HBO’s Real Sports when asked if bringing players back to campus for training this summer put them at increased risk of infection.
“In relation to what?” Sankey said. “Do you exercise in home gyms that may have been your own hot spots without the supervision of sports medicine specialists, without strength and conditioning trainers? And this truth has informed what I still think is the right decision.
When you lead a billion-dollar patriarchy that doesn’t have to negotiate workplace terms or situations, it’s probably fairly simple to say things like that before you know if it’s true.
But Sankey’s logic is broken to a very basic level, simply hunting for the fact that more than a dozen organizations across the country have already noticed epidemics giant enough to avoid training. So when you told an athletes’ organization that they and some of their peers would inevitably contract COVID-19 just because you brought them to campus to play football, you can’t intelligently deny that you have a greater threat of infection.
What is now at the heart of considerations for athletes and schools is how to rationalize this risk.
For professional athletes from other leagues who want to do it again this summer, there are very transparent monetary incentives that players can analyze and value. But for college athletes, who get nothing more than the same scholarships, health care and education they would have regardless of COVID-19, schools only presented this: “Players need to play.”
Of course they do. We all know that. But instead of being treated as very important partners in an entertainment business, they are asked to serve as essential staff so that schools that have spent generously and irresponsibly for years on the comforts and salaries of coaches can minimize the difficult decisions they make. you’ll have to do. Brands and television networks can show some of the money they lost without live sports for much of this year.
This is a tricky thing to justify at first glance, without even taking into account the fact that the greatest successes of a season are largely white directors and that those invited to occupy jobs are often black players.
For schools that are concerned about that optics, the initial reaction may be, notice this, looking to do more sports this fall, not less. While the NCAA Board of Governors is in a position to talk about more this week if canceling or postponing its fall championships, Sports Illustrated detailed some initial talks Saturday among Power Five directors about celebrating theirs.
In other words, if the NCAA makes the decision that it is not feasible to host national cross-councheck out, box hockey, men’s and women’s football, women’s volleyball and men’s water polo championships this fall, the Power Five could see it in the future. in combination and do it. In any case.
The headline of this news is that it may be just a first step towards breaking the schools of strength with an NCAA that was not very popular on the ground anyway but which was felt as increasingly useless and not reactive to the pandemic.
Okay. But what it’s about is the fact that schools that are going to earn tens of millions of dollars in football don’t need to be portrayed in a corner where other fall sports are canceled and seem to advance a football season in dubious and potentially harmful conditions. . so that their operating budgets don’t fall apart.
Power Five schools are so desperate to play football that they would go so far as to provide a very expensive and logistically complicated concept to host sports championships that ensure the loss of cash just so that the optician tells you everything you want to know about priorities.
Athletes see it, too. They are paying attention like never before and organizing in a way that their predecessors too risky.
Vital economic problems and the consequences that all weigh, of course, are not easy. Sports departments that decrease the game or decrease their chance of losing tasks. Some corporations in college towns rely heavily on six or seven Saturdays a year and would possibly have to retire if football is not played in 2020. Every bad news brings the industry closer to disaster.
But what underlies all the plans schools have made to have football this year is the will of the players to settle for the same agreement they have had, regardless of the dangers or situations they are expected to suffer. And the more they listen, the less they seem to appreciate it.
If college sports start to take this into account, a pandemic is just the beginning of their problems.