It’s incredibly absurd, but perfectly suited to the way the COVID-19 pandemic spread in the United States, that the fate of the entire school football season can be summed up by believing in one group of medical experts rather than another.
The college presidents of Big Ten and Pac-12 saw the trends, knowledge, and dangers for young athletes to go out to play one season this fall and fold the tents on Tuesday at least spring through the past decisions of the Mid American and West Mountain Conference. Meanwhile, the university rectors of the SEC, the CCA and perhaps the big 12 reviewed their own set of specialized articles and decided it was worth moving on until something replaced their mind.
If that doesn’t symbolize the American conundrum in this sensitive, polarized moment in history, I don’t know what it does. And like everything that’s happened since March, we all deserve better.
Let’s be transparent on one thing. As deeply unhappy as Tuesday was for athletes, coaches and fans, it is possible, if not likely, that big ten and Pac-12 have made the right decision. Unfortunately, the United States has not yet put its weapons around COVID-19, particularly in the past five months, putting many others in danger, while college campuses are expected to reopen in the coming days.
And contrary to what President Trump falsely claims in a Fox Sports Radio exhibition that football players are “very young physically strong people, so they probably wouldn’t have a problem,” there’s a major fear about the effect of long-term fitness going forward and on the next story of athletes presenting myocarditisArray , which is an inflammation of the heart, after recovering from COVID-19.
WHAT WE KNOW: Updates on the fate of the school football season
Following? Now that Big Ten, Pac-2 may not play football in the fall, will all Power Five meetings follow?
The demanding situations of doing everything that adapts to the paradigm of college athletics where players are not paid for their risk, participate in a game that cannot be socially distant and on a campus where they are going to be exposed to the virus, they were going to be massive. The fact that our country simply does not recover in the spring, allowing COVID-19 to spread like gunpowder throughout the summer, was an act of self-sabotage and the consequences had an impact on a game that in many other people so joy. .
As Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said in a press release: “Unlike professional sports, school sports work in a bubble. Our sports systems are larger campus components in communities where, in many cases, the prevalence of COVID-19 is significant. »
This makes a lot of sense for who will pay attention to. But what doesn’t make sense is that the four meetings that canceled or postponed fall sports cited reviews by their medical experts, the SEC and the CCA did the same in seeking to save an autumn season.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said Tuesday at Dan Patrick Show that his league’s medical advisory board is “comfortable” on the current track towards the end of the season and began last September. Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist who is helping the CCA consultant, told the Sports Business Journal that his organization felt they could “sufficiently mitigate the threat of bringing COVID to the football field” to have a season.
Although a new virus and the assessment of all dangers require art in addition to science, everyone who invests in the game deserves a more detailed explanation of what separates expert reviews from experts cited at other conferences.
For the sake of sport, the most productive way would have been to convince everyone to breathe, avoid season arrangements, and regroup sometime in September after seeing what happens to COVID-19 when normal academics return to campus. That would have given school football enough clue to start in mid-October and, if the cases are greater than the last, play a valid season.
So he would like to think that if Big Ten and Pac-12 schools were calling combat now, the knowledge of medical experts was transparent enough, pressing enough, and alarming enough to justify such a dramatic decision.
“We rely on science. We are academics,” said University of Oregon President Michael Schill. “We’ll read about facts, not just opinions. But we fully perceive that this has huge human impacts. We have academics whose dream of playing this year and that dream, at least in the fall, will not come true. We have families, coaches and all sorts of people who expect to do so and that’s one of the reasons we’ve delayed our resolution so far. But in the end, we looked at recent central evidence, expansion in some of our regions and just said there were too many questions.”
But how do we get other people to sign up when other leagues seek their own knowledge and come to another conclusion?
No wonder we haven’t been able to locate anything unusual and gather anything since March to fight the virus, who prefer to shout one after the other as the numbers increase and the rest of the global reopens more successfully.
Beyond the sheer sadness of so many wonderful systems that aren’t playing this fall, what happened on Tuesday is bad for school football and bad for counterattack. And this will only invite the worst of college sports: systems that are still underway and that seek to corrupt the players they have closed off. Schools like Nebraska are causing a public crisis and threaten to play a season anyway even though their Big Ten brothers have made another decision. The SEC is looking to recruit the big 12 to continue on the right path for a season so that their hand is not forced.
It’s not what college game pretends to be, but it’s consistent with what it’s been. Unfortunately, existing fractures will only be widened from here and suspicions will deepen, and no one has a smart explanation for why this should have happened this way.
But when no one can agree on a set of fundamental facts or the experts who deserve to be believed, you are in chaos. College football is an American sport.