|
COPING WITH CORONA
College football seemed headed towards a controlled re-opening with new schedules announced and four conferences looking solid.
Northern Illinois University killed football in the MAC and made in roads with his easily swayed colleagues in the Big Ten. Pat Forde, a recognizable name still at Sports Illustrated:
Sean Frazier’s life has revolved around football since he was young. He played the sport growing up on Long Island, N.Y., and was a walk-on linebacker at Alabama from 1987–91. He went into coaching and then athletic administration, and has been the athletic director at Northern Illinois University since 2013.
Today, after playing an improbably large role in what may be the beginning of the end of the 2020 college football season, Frazier is both determined and demoralized.
“Right now, I feel emotionally spent,” Frazier told Sports Illustrated Saturday. “This is one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life. Football has given me everything I have related to my career. It is emotional for me, as someone who loves football, to do what we had to do.
“Our president (Lisa Freeman) has given us great leadership. We had to make a decision to protect lives, but I also had to take something away from our young men. I had to step up and do what’s right, even if it hurt.”
Frazier and Freeman led the way in persuading the Mid-American Conference to postpone its football season to spring, sources told SI. (“NIU is the squeaky wheel,” one said a few days ago, prophesying what was to come.) Frazier would not confirm that his school was prepared to unilaterally sit out if the league proceeded with a fall schedule, but it seems clear that that was the intent. And, sources said, NIU had won over some other league schools to its side.
By shortly after 10 a.m. ET Saturday, the rest of the MAC had come around to NIU’s aspiration for a spring season. That toppled the first domino in what might be a chain reaction of postponements or cancellations across the FBS of college football. Shortly thereafter Saturday, the Big Ten paused its progression toward full-contact practices Saturday, and has its own presidents’ meeting scheduled for later in the day. (A vote on whether to postpone the season was not expected.) A Pac-12 presidents’ meeting Tuesday will also create a lot of curiosity.
Some have theorized that the MAC made its move because it knows what direction its wealthy and powerful midwestern neighbor, the Big Ten, is headed. Frazier said that’s not the case.
“I can’t speak for them,” Frazier said, though he worked for Barry Alvarez at Wisconsin for several years and has relationships with several other Big Ten athletic directors. “The Big Ten has great leadership, but I think they’re struggling the same way we are.”
From there? It would be difficult for the other conferences to stay the course and try to play.
If it comes to a complete postponement of the most popular and profitable college sport in America, let the obit show that the first real blow was landed by a middling university in DeKalb, Ill. Northern Illinois, with an enrollment of about 15,700, had the No. 124 football team in NCAA Division I in 2019, according to the Sagarin Ratings. The 5–7 Huskies were just another mid-level program in the low-level MAC.
How does that happen? How does Northern Illinois potentially set the tone for Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Clemson and every other power program?
By taking a stand, and perhaps pricking the conscience of its colleagues. The lurching journey toward playing football has conflicted almost all the stakeholders—is this good and right, fair and equitable, or reckless and soulless? Ultimately, the voice of clear and strong dissent cut through some mixed and ambivalent MAC messages.
“The bottom line is, we don’t have a vaccine,” Frazier said. “We can do all the testing. I appreciate all the work that went into planning our great protocols on testing. But as soon as we try to compete, we’re going to have stoppages. And we don’t know the long-term effects of this.
“I don’t want to get politics involved, or the election, or any of that gobbledegook. I made this decision for the betterment of all parties right now. Maybe in six months, things look different. I hope so. But now? The gig is up.”
Frazier said he went into July very much believing the gig would go on. But as the nation’s virus numbers exploded, his outlook swung sharply toward pessimism.
“COVID blew up my little world a month ago,” he said. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to protect these kids?’ I’m a traditionalist and I believe football should be played in the fall, but nothing about COVID is traditional. It feels sacrilegious, but we had to start thinking about the spring.”
Eventually, that thinking became resolve. And that resolve carried over to MAC meetings as a leading voice pushing to postpone the season. With Freeman onboard and the school unwilling to yield, an expected vote on Thursday didn’t come to pass. The MAC delayed action until Saturday, then came down on the side NIU was pushing all along.
“If it saves us one player’s life, one heart, one long-term health complication, it’s worth it,” Frazier said, “I’m not a doctor. I’m a former football player and coach, and I’m in charge of safeguarding our kids. I’m doing everything I can in that regard.”
Football is not an inherently safe sport. So in the big picture, Frazier’s thinking would seem to be the end of any football being played ever.
As conferences meet and discuss, the public pushback against Team Timid/Team Prudent is being led by Clemson QB TREVOR LAWRENCE. Dennis Dodd of CBSSports.com:
The 2020 college football season appears to be crumbling before our eyes amid the coronavirus pandemic. Power Five conference commissioners held a meeting Sunday to address the viability of playing football in the fall, and there will be another meeting Monday, CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd reported. Some Power Five conferences appear to be leaning toward not playing this fall, perhaps with the hopes of postponing the season until the spring.
That led some of college football’s biggest stars to speak up Sunday in an effort to save the season, channeling the NFL players’ #WeWantToPlay movement. Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence explained his position in a three-post Twitter thread that kicked off a round of tweets from other stars following in his footsteps.
By midnight, #WeWantToPlay joined with #WeAreUnited in a call to not only play college football in the fall but do so safely while ultimately creating a college football players association. The demands of the joint effort aren’t numerous in length, but the push to create a college football players’ association representing the power conferences is massive.
“People are at just as much, if not more risk, if we don’t play,” the junior signal-caller wrote earlier Sunday. “Players will all be sent home to their own communities where social distancing is highly unlikely and medical care and expenses will be placed on the families if they were to contract COVID-19. Not to mention the players coming from situations that are not good for them/ their future and having to go back to that. Football is a safe haven for so many people.
“We are more likely to get the virus in everyday life than playing football. Having a season also incentivizes players being safe and taking all of the right precautions to try to avoid contracting covid because the season/ teammates safety is on the line. Without the season, as we’ve seen already, people will not social distance or wear masks and take the proper precautions.”
As one of the sport’s most recognizable names, Lawrence may be the unofficial face of the movement. However, more than a dozen players with representatives from all Power Five conferences had a part in its creation. Per ESPN’s Dan Murphy, a direct message between Clemson running back Darien Rencher and Stanford defensive lineman Dylan Boles at 5:30 p.m. PT Sunday was the starting point in the dialogue. Soon thereafter, a Zoom call featuring Alabama running back Najee Harris, Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields, Oklahoma State running back Chuba Hubbard and Oregon lineman Penei Sewell, among others, was organized. The players spoke for about 30 minutes before agreeing on the points listed on the #WeAreUnited x #WeWantToPlay graphic, including “universal support” for a players’ association for all college athletes.
The sudden, late-night development was, as Boles told ESPN, the “crown jewel” of what players from all over the country had been demanding over the last couple of months. Fields and other college football players began issuing the same statement in a midnight tweetstorm that trended No. 1 in the United States.
How the power conferences respond to #WeWantToPlay remains to be seen, though Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yuracheck has tweeted his support for it. The Big Ten is considered to be the conference that may start the domino effect among the Power Five leagues of postponing or otherwise canceling the season. But that has received pushback from players and their parents who aren’t exactly thrilled about that idea. Dr. Corey Teague, father of Ohio State star running back Master Teague, tweeted a letter on behalf of the Football Parents Association at Ohio State (FPAOS).
“As parents, we strongly believe. our sons want to play the upcoming season and have the full trust of the university and coaching staff long with medical experts have found a safe way for that to occur,” the letter said. “We believe that this age group represents some of the healthiest individuals, while we recognize the risk can’t be eliminated, we believe the risk is minimal and the season can safely and responsibly occur.”
Players from the Big Ten and Pac-12 have already formed groups to demand reforms to benefit the health, well-being and financial stability of student-athletes. That is just the latest item in a offseason that has shown players that they have the ability to enact change and make their voices heard on a variety of issues. If they’re successful, the members of the #WeWantToPlay movement could be seen as the people who saved the college football season.
Also Clay Travis is, as you would expect on Team Brave/Team Reckless:
The 2020 college football season is hanging by a thread right now and with it so are all of college sports until the fall of 2021.
Because make no mistake about it, if college football isn’t played this fall, it’s highly likely no college sports will be played again until the fall of 2021. We’re staring down an 18 month college sports hiatus squarely in the face right now.
Expectation among many in the college sports industry is that Big Ten university presidents will soon vote to shut down the fall football season, setting in place a domino effect that will lead to the Pac 12 immediately following suit followed by increasing pressure being placed upon the ACC, Big 12 and SEC to also cancel their seasons.
This isn’t a decision that makes logical sense and many — coaches, players, administrators, athletic directors, even some university presidents — all know it, but they feel powerless to stop the tide of panic and fear porn that has brought us to this moment.
How did we get here and what is coming in the days and weeks ahead? More importantly, is there any road map that can keep college football on track to be played this fall? And if so, what must happen for that to occur?
Let’s dive into the college football maelstrom and try to make sense of what’s going on right now.
First, let’s consider where we are in the larger sports universe. Most high school football, MLB, the NBA, NHL, MLS, NFL, PGA, LPGA, NASCAR, the NWSL, the US Open in tennis, UFC, boxing, the Kentucky Derby and the Indy 500 are all happening either right now or in the near future.
The only major sport at this point in time that is potentially going to be canceled is college football.
How is it possible that all of these sports, both pro and amateur, are finding ways to play and college football can’t find a way to play?
It’s because school presidents have fallen victim to fear porn.
I’ll explain why in a moment, but let’s start here with a data point that is imperative to consider in all contextual arguments about college athletics: college kids are not, as a group, at any kind of substantial risk of death from the coronavirus. College kids are more likely to die driving to campus than they are from the coronavirus. They are more likely to be murdered or die of alcohol or drug overdoses than they are of the coronavirus. The risk of death or serious injury to college kids from the coronavirus is lower than the risk of death from the seasonal flu.
These facts should matter to adults in university settings, but they are being overshadowed by fear porn.
Now, to be fair, it is impossible to stop college kids from becoming infected with the coronavirus — indeed, with college kids returning to campus the virus is likely to spread widely — but, and this is highly significant, almost none of these college students will have serious health issues. In fact, most won’t even know they have it at all. For those that feel sick, it will strike the majority as a cold or mild virus. It’s impossible to completely eliminate risk, but students on college campuses are under far more danger from alcohol and the flu than they are from the coronavirus.
What’s more, for athletes in particular, there is zero evidence to support the idea that college athletes are safer off campus than they are on campus. This is an important detail that fear porn purveyors — and those that buy into the fear porn narrative — are unable to combat and frequently won’t discuss. College athletes are being regularly tested and treated by medical professionals on campus. If they test positive they receive immediate treatment from highly trained health professionals, often before they even know they are ill at all.
Athletes off campus don’t have this luxury. They aren’t being regularly tested and if they have the virus they are likely to spread it to others, including elderly family and friends. That’s why the vast majority of athletes will find themselves in a much more dangerous environment living off campus than they do living on campus. Furthermore, athletes are far more likely to come into contact with elderly friends and family off campus than they are on campus.
In all the talk about the risk to athletes, I rarely see anyone point this out: athletes are safer on campus than they would be off campus. Again, we can’t eliminate risk — it’s possible that an athlete could get sick or even die while living on campus — but it’s far more likely an athlete will get sick or die off campus than it is on campus.
That’s why university presidents who are poised to shut down college athletics aren’t actually making things safer for athletes if they do so. In fact, they’re actually making it more dangerous for their athletes by shutting down sports. What they are doing in shutting down college football — and other athletic events — is simply passing the risk elsewhere.
Shutting down college sports isn’t about making athletes safer, it’s about university presidents being able to shift the blame elsewhere. This is exact opposite of what real campus leadership should look like. University presidents aren’t mitigating risk by shutting down sports, they’re actually increasing it for their athletes — but putting the risk elsewhere. They aren’t making athletes safer, they’re making their own jobs safer.
This is what reasonable members of the sports media should be pointing out. Instead their pollyannaish embrace of perpetual fear porn headlines has terrified university presidents, leading them to determine the only safe alternative is the one that’s actually less safe — cancel college football. It’s an epic failure of the sports media and the people in positions of power at universities. Logic and reasonable analysis of risk factors have been replaced by fear porn, anecdotes override facts, outlier viral stories lead to broken policies. This is the coronavirus story writ large, but it’s being exploited in sports at the college level. (While members of the sports media want to claim their coverage isn’t impacting decision making, this is farcical. Time after time in talking with officials at universities they point to the coverage of college football on Twitter and their fear of being blamed in the event something bad happens. We’ve reached a point where many people in positions of power fear losing their jobs to a mob on social media more than they fear making the wrong decision. The result is many of these university officials are willing to make the wrong decisions for their institutions because it makes their own jobs safer. It’s the exact opposite of what we expect leaders to do. These university administrators aren’t making the tough, right decision, they’re making the weak, wrong decision. All to preserve their own jobs at the expense of the long term institutional health of their employers.)
Because, and this is key, make no mistake about it, the effect of a college football season not being played will be cataclysmic for college athletic departments. (As well as the college communities and businesses reliant upon athletics). If you don’t play college football this fall, you aren’t playing in the spring. (Again, even floating this idea is a sports media failure. The risks to college football players aren’t going to magically be eliminated in the spring. And even if there is a vaccine, it will be the summer, likely, before that vaccine is widespread and available to all. Can you imagine the reaction if colleges get their athletes vaccinated so they can play sports before others at higher risk in their communities are able to get the vaccines? Heck, this was a concern when it came to testing. If anything, college athletes, young and healthy as they are, will be the last people getting the vaccine. And even if the vaccine is widely available by February or March, which seems highly unlikely, do you really think college kids are going to be able to play 20 or 24 games in the space of six months? Their bodies won’t hold up. It’s far more dangerous to play the actual sport of football, ironically, than the coronavirus itself is. Which makes the coronabros in the sports media huge hypocrites. College athletes are likely to have severe health effects from playing football. And have been doing so for decades. Yet no one says a word about those far more prominent risks. But now the coronavirus is here, which offers almost no threat to them, and suddenly student health is paramount? It’s a joke.)
If college football doesn’t play then there’s no way college basketball happens either. If you can’t play an outdoor game of football in September, how can you play basketball indoors in November, December or January? Goodbye March Madness for a second year in a row. Hello, athletic department bankruptcies.
Without revenue producing sports for 18 months, most athletic departments can’t continue to provide scholarships for additional students. So sports will be canceled in abundance. Many of those cancellations will impact women’s sports the most, because women’s sports all make no money.
The ultimate irony here of canceling college football? Football will still be on TV on Saturdays. It will just be the NFL instead of college. The NFL, which has businessmen for owners, will sweep right in and take over all the Saturday broadcast windows for college football, likely pocketing hundreds of millions of additional dollars in the process, helping to make up for the money they lose from ticket sales.
The end result of this decision will be straightforward, simple, and devastating: college athletics as we know it will collapse.
So how do we combat this from happening?
I think politicians are our best options, honestly, which tells you what dire straits we’re in right now. The cancellation of college football is a profoundly political decision. It’s not based on health, it’s based on passing risk from universities to someone else.
Once the school presidents start voting to cancel seasons it will be extremely difficult to overturn those decisions. We need action and debate and we need it now. That’s why we need governors in the SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, ACC, and Pac 12 states to speak loudly RIGHT NOW and say that their state institutions, particularly those that are open with students attending class, will be playing sports this fall. Unfortunately, that’s likely to be political as well. Red state governors — that is, most of the SEC and Big 12 states — are likely to be more outspoken than blue state governors. But that’s unfortunate because this shouldn’t be partisan. The viral impact across the country is the same for college kids whether they are in Michigan, Texas, Florida or California. But all too often everything is political these days.
United States senators, congressmen, and local political leaders also need to make their voices heard if they want college sports between now and the fall of 2021. Because right now they are almost all silent and school presidents are taking that silence as acquiescence to their authority to make these decisions.
Finally, and this is a bit of a wild card because he’s so radioactive right now he provokes visceral agreement and disagreement by taking a position on anything: we also might need President Trump to speak out about the importance of college football.
What we desperately need, at the absolute minimum, is a national debate before these presidents vote to end the college football season. If my side, the one that favors playing college football, loses a robust, uninhibited and rigorous debate, I can live with that. But I can’t live without that debate, with silent acquiescence to left wing school presidents who are making decisions rooted in fear instead of facts.
We need all the facts laid out for all the public to see what risks there are for allowing college sports to return. We need to allow individual players and coaches to opt out of the season if they so desire, but we also need for those players and coaches who want to play, which is the vast, vast majority of the college football players in the country, to be able to make their arguments in favor of playing.
Ultimately, it’s time for those of us in this nation who want to be able to go back to work, school and sports to be able to do so. Everyone doesn’t have to go back to work, school and sports, but we can’t continue to allow the most fearful in our population to dictate the choices the rest of us are allowed to make.
If some people are so fearful they want to stay in their homes for months and not come outside until there’s a vaccine, that’s their right, but those people shouldn’t take away the rights of the rest of us, who understand that life comes with risk, and are willing to step out into the bright shining sun and live our lives.
It’s well past time for the silent majority to speak and for college football to join every other sport in America in finding a way to play this fall.
And here are thoughts from Joel Klatt of FOX Sports:
Klatt acknowledged that the coronavirus is a big deal and that he and his family are following CDC guidelines and wearing masks and social distancing, but that the total numbers of deaths and cases don’t paint a clear picture of the risk factors for a specific age group — namely college football players.
“This virus is statistically close to zero threat to college age kids,” Klatt said. “They are at far greater danger from things like car accidents, homicide, suicide, heart disease — even lightning strikes — than they are from Covid.”
Klatt made five core arguments:
1) Those that want to opt out should be able to opt out without fear of losing their scholarship. (With a caveat, he means you should wholly opt out, and be in close to isolation as opposed to being around team activities.)
2) Nothing should be in stone — revisions and adjustments should be made and expected, as they have been for example with the PGA Tour.
3) Players will be healthier within the structure of football than outside it. This includes testing, tracing, academic structure — “This is a safer bubble than being in the normal fray of everyday life … The only thing safer than being in this structure is being in isolation or quarantine.”
4) The human impact of cancellation — people have been dealing with suicide and depression at far greater rates than before Covid. “It would be naive to think that we wouldn’t see a rise in depression and the overall deterioration of mental health of these college football players, many of whom who have been singularly focused on their sport and achievement in their sport their entire life — to take that away from them at this point I think would be very detrimental to their mental health.”
5) The financial impact — you would lose thousands or tens of thousands of scholarship opportunities across college athletics without football as a financial engine.
Under cloak of darkness, in secret session, the Big Ten has apparently voted to suspend its season. This from the Detroit Free Press:
See you later, college football.
The Big Ten has voted to cancel the 2020 college football season in a historic move that stems from concerns related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, multiple people with knowledge of the decision confirmed to the Free Press.
The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the decision. A formal announcement is expected to Tuesday, the sources said.
The presidents voted, 12-2, Sunday to end the fall sports in the conference. Michigan and Michigan State — which both has physicians as presidents — voted to end the season, sources said. Only Nebraska and Iowa voted to play, Dan Patrick said on his radio show Monday.
The move comes two days after the Mid-American Conference became the first in the FBS to cancel ts season, and sources told the Free Press the Big Ten is trying to coordinate its announcement with other Power Five conferences.
Sources told the Free Press on Saturday that Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren prefers a spring football season, although no decision has been made.
The media sources are apparently in error – but maybe just ahead of the news. The vote will come tonight.
@Graham_Couch
The Big Ten’s presidents are scheduled to meet again on a call at 6 o’clock ET tonight, when they’ll make the final decision on the football season, per source.
Clay Travis on Kevin Warren, the former Vikings exec, who finds himself playing both sides:
@ClayTravis
Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren has been an unmitigated disaster. Puts out new schedule last week, says he’s fine with his son playing football on Thursday, then this weekend he tries to bully all of college football into canceling the season? Pathetic leadership.
Should the reports prove prescient, will alumni respond furiously to the vote or meekly acquiesce to the presidents’ dicta?
Will the SEC, ACC and Big 12 hang tough?
Pushback from QB JOE BURROW:
@JoeyB
I feel for all college athletes right now. I hope their voices are heard by the decision makers. If this happened a year ago I may be looking for a job right now.
Donald Trump has noticed TREVOR LAWRENCE:
@realDonaldTrump
The student-athletes have been working too hard for their season to be cancelled. #WeWantToPlay twitter.com/trevorlawrence…
|
