No College Football Is Our Penance for Not Giving a Damn

Photo: Tammy Anthony Baker

by Julian Spivey
On Tuesday of this week the Big Ten and Pac-12, two of the Power 5 conferences in college football, announced they wouldn’t be holding a season this fall as scheduled. The conferences hope to be able to compete in the spring semester of 2021.
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The other three Power 5 conferences: ACC, Big 12 and SEC still plan on going forward with their seasons in which they will compete against other schools within their respective conferences, despite initial thoughts that some of the Power 5 opting out might start a domino effect among all of them.

Some schools are also searching for ways to compete this fall in college football and other collegiate sports, despite their conference postponing potential play to the spring like my alma mater University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Ark. in the Southland Conference.

Central Arkansas, which competes in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), is supposed to be in the season-opening national kickoff game against Austin Peay in Montgomery, Ala. on Saturday, August 29 and the bulk of the college football season is supposed to begin the first weekend in September, though things are very fluid right now.

It’s very possible that by the time the sport is supposed to kickoff for its first games that all of the conferences will have relented and given in to COVID-19.

And they absolutely should.

Putting student-athletes, who don’t get paid to perform mind you, in danger for monetary gain and school pride (but mostly the monetary gain) is simply outrageous. COVID-19 numbers throughout this country are not getting better, in fact in many places the number are trending upward, and just Wednesday (August 12) the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Robert Redfield warned in an interview with WebMD that America is likely to undergo “the worst fall, from a public health perspective, we’ve ever had.” This is with the virus already causing upwards of 200,000 deaths in this country since March.

Really makes you want to send your sons out there to tackle the hell out of each other, doesn’t it?

What really seemed to by the final nail in the proverbial, but honestly if the other conferences go through with the season might as well say literal coffin, was the reveal that at least five Big Ten Conference athletes – mind you people in peak condition health-wise – were found to be suffering from myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. According to ESPN.com, the condition is usually caused by a viral infection and left undiagnosed and untreated can cause heart damage and sudden cardiac arrest. It’s rare, but COVID-19 has been linked with myocarditis with a higher frequency than other viruses based on studies beginning to come out.

This country has now had almost half a year to attempt to bring this virus to its knees – maybe not completely wipe it out because that may not even be possible – but at least get back to a state where we could try to resume some semblance of normal life like we’ve seen from virtually every other country in this great big world. We as a country have bitched about masks, bitched about social distancing, bitched about shutting down places and are more concerned about reopening things (which some places did way too soon) and just now at the start of what should be college football season are ready to send our children and the unsung heroes of our country that are teachers into the line of fire. Hell, some in this country spent most of the last few months thinking the whole damn thing was a hoax and some probably still think it is because they still know a person who’s been diagnosed. We as a country barely even tried to do anything about COVID-19 because “our rights” and are seeming distrust of medical experts, scientists and media.

So now some of us won’t be seeing our favorite college football teams play this fall. Hopefully within the next few weeks none of us will get to see our favorite college football teams play this fall. It’s too dangerous and we don’t deserve it anyway. No college football this year is our penance for not giving a damn.

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