College Football Wasn’t Worth It
With other options on the table college football chose to be reckless, and it shouldn’t be forgotten.
With millions of dollars of resources unavailable to the general public, college football did the impossible and sucked at preventing Covid-19 outbreaks like everyone else.
In the MAC, for example, Miami and Ohio Universities likely required hundreds of thousands of dollars of testing resources in order to play a season. Their reward was three games each. They didn’t even get to play each other.
The popular arguments for playing football in 2020 were bullshit. Rapid testing is a game changer! Nope. Actually, the players are safer with the football programs than back home! Really?
College football’s mistake was thinking it could handle the pandemic better than others. It acquired valuable testing resources allowing schools to implement a patchwork web of safety protocols designed to stop outbreaks. Some schools, like Boston College, succeeded. Others, like Wisconsin, failed. The end result generally was the same as for anything else we tried to do in large groups this year: a lot of people got Covid-19.
The fact that there was a perfectly fine option on the table to play in the spring is insult to injury. The MAC and Big Ten got it right initially, and their wager that it would be safer to play in the spring likely would have paid off, given what we know about the Covid-19 vaccine timeline. But instead of college football taking center-stage in a national celebration of America’s triumph over the pandemic, it chose this:
They had to cancel a game that’s literally called The Game. Surely this would cause everyone to come to grips with the mistakes made. Of course not. Perennial victim Ohio State was, predictably, the story. By rule, the Buckeyes were shut out of the Big Ten title game due to playing too few games, but they were promptly accommodated and it was all a wasted debate.
The reason the conversation turns to this in the wake of a Covid outbreak at Michigan is because the season can’t work if it doesn’t. Nobody loves a good overcoming adversity narrative quite like football people, and if the pandemic can’t be spun into just another plot foil for the sport’s usual heroes (re: Ohio State), then it’s something that can’t be fixed by working hard and doing the right thing. That’s unacceptable in football.
The sheer boringness of the narratives this season is infuriating. With everything else going on in the world of college football the best storyline anyone can muster is the exact same as every season: arguing about Ohio State being in the playoff field.
Even the non Buckeye-centric narratives are boring. There’s still an argument raging over whether the playoff system is fair to the Group of Five. That issue is already settled. If schools like Cincinnati could make the playoff, then they never would have built the thing in the first place. It doesn’t matter if Coastal Carolina aggressively scheduled, the folks in charged lied about caring about that.
Centering the story of the outbreak at Michigan on the playoff lets people feel normal and ignore all of the uncomfortable stuff. Uncomfortable stuff like how Temple couldn’t even field a real team this year, leading Rod Carey to go as far as saying “Covid won”
Anything to not talk about the sick players. Here’s ESPN’s Bomani Jones talking to Slate about what’s missed when talking about cases:
“We basically work with the same pattern on all of these cases: A positive test comes in. That person always is either asymptomatic or has mild symptoms, because they just found out. So they’re catching it early and we find out about it when they don’t really exhibit symptoms, and then we don’t come back again until they test negative. We ask no questions in between, and nobody’s asking them how they felt or any of that stuff”
He’s talking about the NFL, but the same concept applies. Over 40 scholarship players at Michigan can’t play in a century-old rivalry game, and who is sick or how sick they actually are is mostly a mystery because it’s all reported as “roster issues.” Everyone moves on. Remember, it’s only about the playoff.
If an athlete doesn’t come out seriously ill on the other side, our consciences just move along. Actually, not even death stops us.
As this season comes to a close the folks that pushed hardest for a season to be played will do everything in their power to make people feel good about what was accomplished here. The phrase “considering the circumstances” will get quite a workout.
There will be a lot of grading on a curve. Most fans will play along. After all at the same time LSU was letting the virus run through its entire locker room, the Big Ten was getting pilloried for not playing. Priorities have likely not shifted much since then.
The teams that could barely get on the field will be glossed over. They were just isolated tragedies, after all. If blame needs to be assigned, why not the Covid-19 protocols themselves?:
All of this is done to ignore what a failure this whole thing was. The most sinister part in all this, and the most contentious by a mile, is how easily the risks posed to young, healthy people by the virus were waived away in August in support of bringing football back.
Former Temple running back and current Jacksonville Jaguar Ryquell Armstead was hospitalized twice, barely able to breathe. He is 23. Miami Hurricanes junior cornerback Al Blades has myocarditis and is done for the year.
Outside of american football, Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba reported that he “couldn’t run” in the first game of the season despite being cleared of Covid-19. He’s 27.
A vast majority of athletes will be fine. Infected with Covid-19 or otherwise their careers will not be adversely impacted in the short or long term. That’s still a pretty messed up reason to force unpaid athletes to accept the risk they could end up in a hospital bed unable to breathe.
It’s not that people can’t or even shouldn’t enjoy the season. I plan to enjoy quite a few beers yelling about Western’s zone coverage this Saturday in hopes they beat Ball State and head to a conference championship game. I will absolutely celebrate the hanging of that asterisk-free MAC title banner at Waldo Stadium if it comes to that. But trust me, none of this comes without guilt.
We have to be honest about what’s happened here, and not let the conferences that made these decisions escape without facing some accountability. The Big Ten played so Ohio State could compete for a playoff. It should have to answer for that. The rest of the conferences that were just lesser financial dominos in that chain of events? They should have to answer for it too.
College football knew the risks, did the bare minimum required to feel more comfortable, and then pressed on. It did something extremely dumb and people got hurt, and while that in no way means we can’t enjoy it (since that’s basically college football’s default setting), we should maybe think more about who we’re willing to hurt in order to enjoy our Saturdays.
I keep coming back to the cancellation of the Ohio State-Michigan game. The story couldn’t remain that one of the richest schools in the country, home to one of the top medical systems on the planet, had a Covid-19 outbreak so severe they couldn’t field a team for the only game that matters. We’re going to look back and wonder why the hell we tried to do this.
