Ohio State players stand in the tunnel before a game.
Photo: Jay LaPrete/Associated Press
This stinks. All of it.
Don’t fall for the nonsense that there are powerful forces thrilled by the imminent demise of college football— a cabal of sports haters and/or media elitists who want a shutdown to happen, and are now taking smug satisfaction that games won’t be played in major conferences like the Big Ten and Pac-12 this fall.
Nah. Don’t buy it. This situation stinks. This stinks for basically everyone, including the folks charged with this impossible decision.
Most of all, it stinks for the players, young athletes who worked hard just to get to August, who sacrificed and trained their bodies and followed the health protocols to give their teams a shot to play in September. If we know anything about a college football career, it’s that it goes by in a blur, and the vast majority of the players don’t wind up playing on Sundays. College is the pinnacle of a lot of football lives—and it’s a shame that a season looks to be lost.
They wanted to play. I know that became a hashtag, but I believe it very much.
The players aren’t the only ones losing out, of course. School this year isn’t going to be the same. School this year wasn’t going to be the same, no matter what, but some great college towns in America are going to lose something meaningful, even if it was just going to be a stripped-down, no-fans version of the beloved tradition. The SEC, ACC and Big-12 are hanging in there, saying they’re on track to play, but it’s unclear if that will hold.
Spring football? Who knows.
This situation also stinks for the coaches, assistants, trainers, administrators and college presidents, the people who work in the stadiums and surrounding stores and restaurants, and whomever has to call the fattest cat donors and tell them the suite is locked and the whole thing is off. Big-time college football is big business, it’s undeniable, and a heavy hammer is about to fall.
There will be layoffs, Barry Alvarez, the athletic director of my Big Ten alma mater, Wisconsin, told reporters on Tuesday. One assumes that’s just the start of it for impacted schools. Football revenue has long tentacles, and other programs will likely feel the pain.
Speaking of which, let’s not forget that this isn’t just football losing a fall season in these conferences. Cross-country, field hockey, soccer, women’s volleyball—all of them are hitting pause, too. Those are finite athletic careers as well.
Then there are the TV networks, where the suits are surely screaming into the void at their suddenly empty schedules. Their money is what was driving this push to return, after all. Yes, the players wanted to play; the coaches wanted to coach; you and I would have enjoyed watching it; but the reality is that bills need to be paid.
It’s an uncomfortable truth. And after decades of watching schools wrap themselves in folksy myths of amateurism, it was pretty amusing to watch some of them acknowledge the bottom line. Scott Frost, the coach at Nebraska, estimated the hit on the athletic department for canceling football this season could be between $80-to-$120 million. Such an admission should make a reasonable person think yet again about what a warped form of capitalism college football is, how a head coach can make $8 million, an offensive coordinator $2.5 million, the strength coach half a million, and the player is given the slippery term of art student-athlete and remains unpaid for their contribution on the field.
It’s an imbalance that some current players are rallying to change, as they lobby for an overdue seat at the table. And it makes it a little jarring to hear voices that dismiss talk of player compensation get behind #wewanttoplay like it’s a scene in “Norma Rae.” (Can we retire the false dilemma that players are better off among their teams than they would be at home? No one’s telling teams they need send their athletes home. Keep ‘em there! Test them!)
I respect the passion. This country loves college football and would love any way for it to happen. Me, too. But some of the damn-the-torpedoes talk this week has been a bit much. Here’s former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz, reckoning with the decision by the Big Ten and Pac-12: “When they stormed Normandy, they knew there would casualties and there would be risks.”
Coach! Love you! Can we agree the stakes here are mildly different?
The big picture is important, because the big picture is why we’re here. College football isn’t a bubble, sad to say. It is vast and hard to manage, and it is far from the only industry swept up and tormented by this crisis. Millions in this country remain out of work or underemployed. The national unemployment rate hovers at 10%. The havoc is substantial. I haven’t even gotten to the unfathomable number of lives medically impacted and lost.
And here’s the thing: we still don’t have a handle on it. The numbers are leveling in some places, growing more upbeat in others, and there are a few pockets of fresh concern. But the curve has not been flattened as much as it has been dulled, and our current approach to mitigation seems to be muttering it isn’t so bad and hoping it all works out. Magical thinking isn’t what has worked in other countries, and it hasn’t worked here, and it’s why when colleges went to their doctors and asked for assurances that everything would be OK, they couldn’t get it.
“In the end, there were too many questions that we couldn’t answer, and the doctors didn’t have answers,” Alvarez said in a video message to Wisconsin fans last night.
I know: This is all so annoying. This is the inconvenience of developing science, and it’s deeply frustrating when you’re trying to get back to work, fully open your business, get your kindergartner to kindergarten, protect your grandparents or beat Michigan by two touchdowns on the road. It’s also deeply frustrating if you only want to hear good news.
These past five months have not been our finest hour. As this pandemic has simmered on, and good faith efforts at mitigation have yielded to fatigue, our impatience has degraded into a blame game in which the usual sides are taken, stats are cherry-picked, and a public-health crisis is turned into a choose-your-own-science segment on cable news. We have politicized masks, schools, bars, beaches, and now college football Saturdays. This is a complicated crisis which involves trade-offs between the health of our communities and economic destruction, and instead, the internet teems with amateur epidemiologists and moral philosophers who claim, with comical certitude, to know the correct path forward.
Such clarity is a mirage, I’m afraid. Nobody knows for certain what path is best—for college football, or for anything. Not yet. We have work left to do, all of us.
And, yeah, it stinks.
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Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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