Folks, in the midst of your busy Saturday schedule you may have missed some wildly depressing news from the college football world today. The MAC is postponing their fall football season in 2020 as their board has decided to not play fall sports due to COVID-19.
This is sad news because I really love MACtion. It’s a gritty conference that’s fun to watch and always competitive during conference play. But with most of the Power 5 conferences playing conference only schedules this season it eliminates the need to pay schools from conferences like the MAC to play them which puts a huge dent in their finances.
There’s a lot of rumors swirling today that the Big 10 is looking to cancel their season as well which would be a devastating blow.
If College and University Presidents are the ones pushing for the cancellation of the season then that’s worrisome to me. University Presidents are some of the most out of touch people when it comes to living in the real world and in most cases they attempt to make the decision that appeases the woke mob who cries on Twitter all day while failing to realize that those who cry online don’t represent the population as a whole.
One thing that’s being overlooked is that taking student athletes out of a routine of practicing and playing wouldn’t make them safer. Cancelling college football season doesn’t guarantee the safety of student athletes. If student athletes are on campus then they’ll surely party and engage in social activities. It’s already happened at schools like Louisville and Rutgers. It will surely happen everywhere. Taking student athletes out of a routine that helps teach them discipline is likely going to increase the amount of bad decisions that 18-22 year olds make.
If leagues are smart, what they do is they play the season as currently scheduled but they allow players who feel unsafe to opt out without penalty of losing their scholarships or a year of eligibility. That’s the most rational approach. It allows the schools to have games that help their campuses bottom line and it gives the players a choice in the matter to choose if they want to partake. No player should be forced to play if they don’t want to this season.
Another aspect that is being overlooked is that a lot of college towns rely on the income that comes from their cities hosting college football games each and every year. I know that most people on Twitter, like noted idiot Darren Rovell, don’t care about the millions of businesses and lives that have been destroyed due to lockdowns but it’s something that should be considered, too.
America needs college football. We need to learn how to live with COVID-19 since it may never go away. There has to be a point in time where we say that enough is enough and we figure out a way to adapt so that we can move on as a society. The flu kills tens of thousands of people every year and there’s a vaccine for it. COVID-19 may not be any different. We can’t stay suspended in this dystopian reality forever. There needs to be college football this fall.