For 48 hours, silence has been deafening so they would least be expected to remain silent about the fitness and protection of their student-athletes.
After Big Ten and Pac-12 made the difficult, listening, and kind resolution of finishing their fall sports amid a global pandemic, you immediately expected to hear, say, Duke, who is ranked 4th. Stanford’s Pac-12 and one below Northwest Big Ten in the 10 most sensitive rankings of U.S. News’ most productive national universities – World Report in 2020.
Duke turns out to be the kind of school that would care about science and knowledge. And if that’s not enough, there’s tension between peers in your fellow education, or maybe just look to keep the appearance of the other smarter people in the room.
Of course not. Duke, the prestigious Duke of the CCA, is the only school in the Top 10 News branch of the U.S. You are able to block and face and have 22 young bodies breathing and falling on each other for 3 and a half hours on Saturdays. . this fall while the coronavirus ravies the nation.
Duke has now earned the dubious difference of being the national school of education among the top 10 in challenging science and medicine and making cash, a lot of cash, through the game of football. Everyone is out: in order, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Penn and my alma mater Northwestern, like Johns Hopkins, who is tied in 10th place with Duke.
But let’s move on after that outstanding football player, Duke. As we pass the U.S. News list at number 15, we see you, Notre Dame, on par with Vanderbilt. What the hell are you two schools doing, still playing with the CCA and SEC in this intelligence-denied Russian Roulette Game and will be attached to your names over the next few years?
Then Conference USA Rice, tied with Ivy League Side Cornell in 17th place. Really, Rice? Is football vital to you? Who knows?
A quartet of ACC schools that deserve to know more – Wake Forest in 27th place, Virginia in the 28th and Georgia Tech and North Carolina tied in the 29th – have not yet spoken. There is a theory that a school that participates in such tight meetings might be afraid to speak publicly in favor of the fitness and protection of its students. (I can’t, I just wrote this sentence.) If there’s any fact in that, those CCA schools have no excuse, because there are six in the 30 most sensible U.S. News, adding Notre Dame for football purposes.
In the two days since Big Ten and Pac-12 demonstrated the courage to do the right thing in the face of massive monetary losses, while Big 12, CCA and SEC crawled into the unknown and treacherous, many things have happened. Only Thursday morning, Florida state receiver Warren Thompson said on social media that the school was unable to cope with COVID-related fitness issues, while another FSU recipient, D.J. Matthews tweeted “All The Lies” after posting Wednesday night that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and then deleted the tweet.
Meanwhile, data from the NCAA’s COVID-19 Advisory Committee is not smart to get on with the game this fall. Dr. Carlos del Río, an infectious diseases specialist at Emory University and a member of the NCAA Advisory Committee, said this about fall games at a video convention Thursday:
“I feel like the Titanic. We’ve hit the iceberg and we’re waiting when the band deserves to play.”
He said of the River: “The vital thing right now is that we have this virus. Not having autumn sports this year, to this virus, would be for me the number one priority.
Dr. Colleen Kraft, also an infectious disease specialist at Emory and a member of the NCAA Advisory Committee, said she appreciates meetings to prevent fall sports “because it makes athlete protection the number one priority. As for those who are still moving Forward, he said, “There will be broadcasts (from COVID-19) and they will have to prevent their games.”
So, what is Duke, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Rice and the rest of you, “academic” schools? Are you going to show intelligence and courage and make the right decision to disconnect autumn sports? Or will the resolution be taken for you?