I love college football.
I’ve been a fanatic follower for five decades. Every year at this time I find myself immersed in pre-season magazines, predictions and anticipation. When the season kicks off, it becomes the best time of the year. Over the past 26 years, I’ve attended multiple games at multiple venues every season without fail.
But not this year.
Not in the season of COVID-19.
My favorite teams play in the Big Ten and the Mountain West. Both conferences did the right thing in postponing the season. While parents and athletes are up in arms and threatening legal action, I believe that both conferences did what was best for the student athletes during a time when doing so is rare. In time, the upset parents and players will come to figure that out.
From the moment non-conference games got cancelled, this ceased to be a real college football season. When some conferences aren’t playing at all, and others only playing within their league, and many players – including several top-flight guys – are opting out, how can anyone call any of this more than just a series of exhibitions, staged 100% for the money?
What’s being played this year isn’t a real college football season.
It’s fake.
It’s illegitimate.
And it’s being staged for all the wrong reasons.
Please spare me the “it’s for the kids…the kids deserve to play” argument. The NCAA acted quickly after they smartly cancelled all fall sports championships under their umbrella and granted another year of eligibility to all fall sports athletes, just as they did for spring sports athletes this past March. The kids are losing nothing. In many cases, the kids are getting an extra free year of college.
Games are being staged by some conferences solely for the money and gratification of adults — the same adults who balk at paying college football players (although they’re right about the second part.)
Let’s start with the ‘kids’ part.
Someone please explain to me why college football players should be immune from the impact and the struggle – the life lessons that go with it – being forced upon all of us as we cope with this pandemic? Is there something wrong with college football players learning a little patience? So they have to hit the pause button and wait – just go to school and train – until the pandemic is over. Why is that so awful? They’ll be older, wiser and stronger when they return to the field – and won’t have lost any eligibility.
What’s so bad about that?
Nothing, that’s what.
The “they should play” argument isn’t about the welfare of the players. If it were, no one would be playing.
As for the adults, are we so into instant gratification that the “let the kids play NOW” movement is more of a priority for us than the health and safety of the entire student body and surrounding community?
This is clearly the case at places like Alabama (there’s a shocker) where more than 1,000 students have tested positive for COVID-19 since school began less than two weeks ago. At nearby Georgia State, a freshman quarterback named Mikele Colasurdo won’t play this season after learning he’d developed a dangerous heart condition as the result of having COVID-19. But of course, only old people are impacted. Right.
We are still losing more than 1,000 Americans per day to this virus. But football must be played. Because…football!
Are we so selfish as college football fanatics that we can push aside the COVID outbreaks at North Carolina, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Iowa, Texas Tech and several other places – taking place in the heat of August before we are all forced indoors again during flu season – just so we get to watch football on Saturdays?
Apparently, many are.
Then there’s the money part. Of course this is a huge financial hit for college athletic programs. Of course football revenue is critical to the survival of the majority of athletic programs. But does anyone believe that if we didn’t have a 2020 season, that college football would cease to be in the future? Of course not. And I’m not insensitive to the economic impact on college towns who thrive on football Saturdays. But as we’ve all learned, businesses across the country have had to learn to adapt on the fly like everyone else. It sucks, but it’s our new reality.
On campus, savvy financial people can take out loans, sell bonds, and do whatever it is they do with numbers to offset one year of huge losses – with the assurance that even larger future gains will make things whole again, sooner rather than later. If some people within athletic departments – including many grossly overpaid college football coaches – have to take a hit for a year, so be it. The rest of us have had to.
I’m a high school baseball coach. You know what really hurts? To have a class of seniors who have worked their tails off during the offseason get to the brink of the season’s first pitch and then have the whole thing suddenly cancelled – ending their baseball playing careers. They don’t get another year of eligibility. Those kids are the real victims, not the college football players who get to resume playing whenever America gets the all clear.
The point is we don’t have to have a fake college football season. Players, parents, administrator’s bank accounts, and fans would all survive without it — unlike many of the people who will be infected with COVID-19 because the adults had to be able to watch football in Tuscaloosa.
Listen to Mark Knudson on Monday’s at 12:30 with Brady Hull on AM 1310 KFKA and on Saturday mornings on “Klahr and Kompany” on AM 1600 ESPN Denver.
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