An Abdication of Duty

The Mid-American Conference showed the way.

It was the presidents of the schools in the MAC that made the right decision.

And leave no doubt about it; canceling the FBS college football season in the midst of the pandemic is absolutely, 100 percent, the right decision. I say that as someone who loves watching college football, as exploitative as it is. I am a junkie who is going to be forced to go cold turkey this fall, and I am okay with that if it means keeping the labor force safe from the possible after effects of Coronavirus.

(I’m pulling out the FBS here because most of FCS, Division II and Division III went ahead and pulled the plug already. The FBS were willing to foolhardily plow ahead because, well, money.)

Let me be blunt here: There has been a whole lot of fuckery going on the last few months with this virus, and it is coming home to roost right now. Too many people in power have sat around, not wanting to make tough decisions and have difficult conversations about how things are NOT being handled properly and what are the contingency plans.

There has been a lot of trying to speak things into reality, and not enough dealing with the actual reality on the ground.

I want to say that Mark Emmert and the other “leaders” of the NCAA missed an opportunity. I will admit it is shitty to take advantage of a situation related to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but the opportunity presented itself and was ripe for the picking. It was the lowest hanging fruit imaginable.

As the situation with COVID worsened around the country and conferences sat around, playing the slowest game of chicken imaginable about fall sports and football in particular, Emmert and his team could have shown some gumption and stepped in to say, “Hey. These are unusual times. Let’s think about doing things in a different way.”

I realize that the NCAA is a behemoth in some respects, and that trying to get the organization to shift its modus operandi is probably a tall task. And yeah, maybe it is naive to think that they would even consider doing something moderately unusual. After all, this is an organization that, in many respects, is still operating like it is in the early 20th century. It still holds ideals based in that time period when everything around intercollegiate sports has evolved.

And yeah, while people have this idea that institutions of higher education are these bastions of liberal thought, many are ignorant of the fact that many leaders of universities tend to be pretty conservative by nature. Not just politically, but in general ideology. There typically will be a deference to money, and to also trying to, well, not get sued.

Coronavirus has put a whole lot of folks in a trick bag right now. Again, tough decisions have to be made, and very few appear up to the task of being the one to lead the way and make the tough choice. Not just making the tough choice is enough, though, because you also have to be willing to explain and defend that choice.

It’s easy for the WNBA, the NBA, the NWSL, and the MLS to pull off a bubble scenario. They are professional athletes who are compensated for their time in the bubble. It is simply not feasible for college athletes to be placed in the same situation.

Football was always going to be complicated. It is a collision sport played in both wide open space and in close quarters. It requires a lot of bodies in tight spaces in contact with one another constantly to be played properly.

It’s overly simplistic and dangerous to state, “No one young dies from this” or “The odds of recovery are high for people who are in shape.” The focus on death rates at the expense of long-term health effects is stupid, plain and simple. There is more to this virus than get sick and die or recover and be fine. People are presenting with a wide variety of ailments, and we’re still discovering things as we proceed through this.

The fact of the matter is that an athlete who contracts coronavirus while on the field of play could wind up losing their career. There’s potentially no way around that if the sport moves foward.

And if that was a college athletes who winds up being felled by the virus, the possible lawsuit would at best generate awful headlines and public relations for the institution that he played for. At worst, possibly millions of dollars at stake for loss of potential earnings.

I can’t see any college or university president or athletic director wanting to be on the hook for that proposition.

(I know, I know. Athletes are begging to play. Athletes want to play. Sometimes, though, you have to make a decision that is in someone’s best interest that goes against their desires. It is up to those who have the power to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to make that decision and explain why they made it to the athletes. Because athletes, sadly, do not always see the big picture.)

So sports will have to be canceled. Draft schedules messed up. Questions about how to get back on track with fall football will have to be considered as well. There are a lot of moving parts that do need to be discussed. I don’t want to give the impression that these are easy conversations and easy solutions to come up with.

But the conversations should have been happening as far back as April. That is where I see the abdication of duty. Sure, there is a school of thought that the schools were being optimistic; believing in the power of us coming together collectively as a country and doing whatever it took to conquer the virus.

Hogwash. Hogwash, I say. It was obvious early on that this was going to be a struggle because of vanity and selfishness and rampant egoism. The time for contingency planning was early on, not late. Again, behemoths don’t change course quickly.

But that selfish streak that has kept us as a country from conquering the virus shows up in how the FBS programs have handled the discussion around the season. Too much focus on individualism and not enough of an effort to come up with collective action. Forget being on the same page. These folks aren’t in the same book. They’re not even in the same library.

There has been too much leading from behind from those who are in power. It took one of the smaller conferences to force the hand of others.

Maybe the MAC should be running things from now on.