Opt Out
What are we doing here?
The SEC told players on a conference call that “we’re going to have cases on every single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it.”
We can’t prevent it.
It, of course, is Covid-19 infections. These are the people that are supposed to care for and protect these student athletes and they, like the person currently leading our country, have taken the fatalist position of “shit happens.” What leadership.
The players, because they are smart college students and some of the most talented humans in our country, see through this bullshit. Players in the PAC-12 have taken the opportunity to remind everyone that they are not paid for their efforts in bringing in millions of dollars to their respective universities, and that they should be before they play in a pandemic (and also generally). At Washington State, taking this position is seen as “an issue.” To Nick Rolovich, the issue isn’t your safety, it’s that you feel unsafe and also feel like saying so.
In the Big Ten, the players have not demanded compensation in the way their PAC-12 counterparts have. These players just wan’t their schools to ensure they can be safe while playing in a pandemic, and that should they have expenses related to Covid-19 that they are made whole from it.
They want better contact tracing, improved safety protocols and guaranteed scholarships for those who opt out or are unable to play due to the virus. They asked for whistleblower protections for reporting violations. The players had to ask for all of these things after the Big Ten produced its plan to begin a season. None of this is acceptable.
Players are already getting sick and it’s having an impact on their bodies
That’s LSU linebacker Travez Moore, who lost almost 30 pounds fighting the virus in addition to not being able to breathe. Contracting a respiratory infection of this severity in the middle of a football season will be devastating and, if the SEC is to be believed, unavoidable. We can’t prevent what happened to Travez from happening to literally any athlete that returns to campus in the fall. What the hell are we doing here then?
By pushing forward with the college football season under these current conditions, we’re telling athletes that are sick, will get sick or could get their families sick, “too damn bad.” You see, these universities who are ostensibly committed to being institutions of higher learning are so dependent on college football’s unpaid labor to function that the thought of postponing the games — even when it’s been deemed unsafe in some cases for students to return to campus — is seen as impossible.
Morally speaking, it is difficult to make college football even more corrupt than it already is, but pushing on with the fall season is about as bankrupt as this enterprise can get. It really pulls the curtain back on what this is all about. There’s this idea that America needs sports right now as a panacea to the existential dread we have about the world around us, but until we fix the world around us the dread will only find us where we work, where we live and where we play.
There are sports being played in this pandemic, even safely, but to pretend that this sport is remotely similar to the professional sports leagues is to be ignorant on purpose. The NBA is held up as the gold standard of how to do this but at its best it is a dystopian mini-nightmare with fan reactions streamed into empty seats in the stadium like an episode of Black Mirror. We have to ask ourselves that if the best outcome here is empty stadiums, no tailgates and fake crowd noise, is the imminent danger of the athletes we say we care about worth it?
Of course it’s not.
College football games and college football stadiums become their own functioning city for a few hours on Saturday (or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday), and just like cities with empty streets these vacant places that would otherwise be teeming with people are not beautiful. They are not examples of our ability to adapt in times of crisis. They are haunting monuments to a society’s present failure, and we should reject them until we’ve done the work required to make things right.
We should reject all of this. The health of not one single college athlete is worth it. The SEC is wrong. We can prevent this, just not in a way that makes everyone money. Well, everyone, that is, except the athletes.
