The world according to Jim:
• It seemed to be a discordant message at midweek, when the Tournament of Roses organizers announced there would be no Rose Parade on Jan. 1, 2021, but said nothing to suggest the Rose Bowl might also be in jeopardy.
Maybe they were just staying in their lane.
As prospects of a traditional, full-length college football season grow dimmer, so too are the odds of New Year’s Day football in the Arroyo Seco. This coming season’s Rose Bowl was to be a College Football Playoff semifinal, and from here it seems more likely that if there is to be a season at all in the 2020-21 academic year, it would take place in the springtime. …
• So how would that backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains look in May? Would we even be able to see it through the smog? …
• The entire narrative of college football in the coronavirus pandemic has been fueled by fear of the worst. John Talty, sports editor of the Birmingham News and the AL.com website, wrote earlier this week that much of the determination to play from athletic directors and coaches was pushback for this quote from ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit on a radio show in late March: “I’ll be shocked if we have NFL football this fall, if we have college football. I’ll be so surprised if that happens.”
Wrote Talty: “College athletics leaders, realizing the devastation early on if Herbstreit’s prediction proved true, kicked off a battle to control the narrative … There was too much money at stake, they reasoned privately, to give credence to such potentially disastrous hypotheticals.”
Anybody surprised? …
• In the meantime, programs conducted business-as-usual conditioning programs only to see coronavirus outbreaks at one campus after another. The portion of the population (a) not blinded by a desire for football and/or (b) attentive to the doctors and scientists and their expertise wondered about the sanity of forcing football, or any fall sport, onto campuses that might open in the autumn with at best reduced in-person classes and more likely full online instruction. …
• A week after the Big Ten and Pac-12 cut their football schedules to conference games only, there’s still no certainty games will be played this fall. The SEC and ACC will have to make decisions by the end of July, at the latest – and both conferences have pushed the starts of their other fall sports back to at least the start of September. Closer to home, the CIF Southern and City sections and the California Community College Athletics Association either have already announced fall sports will move to the spring semester or are preparing to do so. …
• Also, as USA Today columnist Dan Wolken pointed out in a Friday column, the failure to create an efficient testing mechanism likely will make it a longshot, if not an impossibility, to play college football this fall, given NCAA guidelines issued this week for “testing and results within 72 hours of competition” plus contact tracing and quarantine specifications for contact sports. If professional sports have had issues with getting test results back quickly, and if testing of the general public has slowed back down to a crawl … well, you can do the math, and it’s not favorable.
Interestingly, those NCAA specs also included a graph that illustrated the rate of infections per million residents in April, when discussions about a return to play commenced, and the even higher rate now thanks to the spike of the last month. Again, not favorable. …
• Meanwhile, the NFL and its Players Association are arguing about how many exhibition games should be played. Given the trend, they should be more concerned about whether their regular season will start on time and make it through 16 games. And if the NFL does make it to its opening weekend, I’d be shocked if there were any fans in stadiums. …
• Considering everything Washington’s NFL team has on its plate these days, a delayed or skipped season might be best. The renaming of the (Redacteds) was quickly pushed to the background Thursday when a Washington Post report outlined a pattern of sexual harassment in the organization, with 15 female employees and two female journalists detailing what they’d encountered.
You want to believe it’s an outlier, a particularly toxic culture in what was already perceived as a dysfunctional organization. So why do I have this nagging feeling that it’s not that isolated? …
• Tell me this isn’t entirely in character: Alex Rodriguez, part of a group attempting to buy the Mets – and maybe trying to curry favor with the owners who will eventually approve a buyer – said during an ESPN conference call Thursday that players should accept the type of revenue-sharing mechanism tied to a salary cap. Then, when the Players Association pushed back, he said he never used the words “salary cap.”
A-Rod, bastion of integrity. …
• Yes, they’re going to be pumping artificial crowd noise into empty ballparks when the baseball season begins, and apparently the soundtrack of choice in most parks will come from the video game “MLB: The Show.” I’ve changed my mind on that; combined with the game’s other sounds (PA announcer, organist, walkup songs, etc.), it lends a bit of normalcy.
But the important question: Will the sound guys be allowed to program resounding boos when the Astros come to town?
jalexander@scng.com
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter
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July 18, 2020 at 05:52AM
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Alexander: Will there be football? And if so, when? - LA Daily News
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