Despite the best efforts of many who want to try to snap their fingers and make everything “normal” again, the year 2020 will continue to be anything but.
And while some professional sports leagues — like the NBA and NHL — will be able to finish seasons that won’t need an asterisk, others can not avoid that fate — Major League Baseball and College Football in particular.
Asterisks will follow their 2020 seasons into the history books forever.
MLB is finishing up a regular season that will include slightly more than one-third the normal number of games played in a season. College football will play fewer games (with some teams playing in the spring of 2021, or not at all), while many will play only conference games, all while a bunch of high profile players have “opted out” of the 2020 season altogether for health and safety reasons.
What’s taking place on these fields is nowhere close to being a real, legitimate championship season, even though two teams — one in baseball and one in college football — will emerge with a ** championship **.
And when the time comes, they’ll hand out prestigious postseason awards as if everything were “normal.”
And that’s just not right.
For example, when MLB hands out an MVP trophy to some player this season, they’ll actually be diminishing the accomplishments of the greats who came before him who have earned that same honor over a full, legitimate 154 or 162-game season. This year’s “MVP” winners should actually be called “The one-third MVP’s.”
Same goes for the Cy Young winners, the Rookies of the (partial) Year, Gold Gloves and all the rest. They weren’t being earned during a legitimate regular season, and they should not count the same.
Then there’s college football. When they present the 82nd Heisman Trophy to a guy from the Big 12, SEC or ACC (because they will have concluded their partial regular seasons in time for the votes to be counted) on December 12th (although that date is subject to change), they’ll be giving it to someone who did really good things during a part of a season.
Go ahead and slap on the asterisks.
The easy solution would be to simply not give out any awards after these partial seasons. Skip ‘em like we skipped Wimbledon, The British Open and March Madness in 2020.
That won’t happen because there are now sponsors involved. So what’s going to happen is a set of asterisk-laden partial season award winners will accept their trophies and everyone everywhere will know the awards are not legit.
Here’s another idea: How about both MLB and College Football wait until after their entire POST-seasons have been played – including the World Series AND the College Football Playoff, and then vote for who should get awards?
Of course this is how it should be being done already every year, but that’s another argument. For now, 2020 has presented these two sports with the opportunity to be creative.
Baseball can do so by making “Most Valuable” actually mean it. Give the award to the guy who leads to his team to – and then through – an expanded playoffs and helps deliver them a title.
Same with College Football.
Make “Most Outstanding” mean more than a pile of regular season stats wracked up against weak competition. Have the Heisman winner be the guy that performed best when it mattered most — like Joe Burrow did last year, and unlike Lamar Jackson did when DeShaun Watson should have won the Heisman in 2016.
If there was ever a season when regular season stats were meaningless, this is it. There are too many guys who’ve had a solid two month run who could take home an award that should really being going to a guy who puts in an extra month of top quality work that results in a championship.
National baseball writer John Heyman tweeted recently, “ I have an NL Cy Young vote and with less than a week to go there are no less than seven pitchers, and perhaps more, who could still get my first place vote. Last I looked it was a seven-way tie.”
How better to break that tie than to wait to see which of the seven continued to perform at award-winning level while under playoff duress?
And if we aren’t going to have any marquee non-conference college football games, and have teams only playing conference members until bowl/playoff season, why not wait until every team has completed this patchwork season to decide who really was the “Most Outstanding Player” in college football in 2020?
The old argument that these are “regular season awards” shouldn’t hold any water when the regular seasons we are talking about are so completely and utterly watered down.
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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