eich41
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RE: The 2020 MAC football season is cancelled
(08-10-2020 10:37 AM)wmubroncopilot Wrote: (08-10-2020 10:32 AM)eich41 Wrote: (08-10-2020 10:29 AM)Schadenfreude Wrote: (08-10-2020 10:12 AM)eich41 Wrote: (08-10-2020 09:17 AM)Schadenfreude Wrote: Before this season, the only lives at risk were those of the people on the field. In this pandemic, playing college football also puts at risk the lives of our parents, grandparents, friends, and neighbors.
Only if they were to go visit those people in person without getting tested and/or going into a 14 day quarantine before.
If Major League Baseball with all its resources can't keep its paid professionals safe from COVID, I don't see how we can reasonably expect college football coaches to keep their unpaid amateur student athletes away from this virus. If football is played this fall, some teams will become vectors and pass this dangerous disease to others.
If your premise is that the players won't follow protocols and take proper precautions to prevent catching and/or spreading the virus while under the direction, oversight, and in a rigid testing protocol, then I can assure you, they and their loved ones are not any safer with them NOT playing football, because if they can't/won't take precautions in that scenario, then they certainly aren't doing so in their day-to-day lives outside of football either. Gotta use some logic here....
I don't actually disagree with this. But..
I have posed this question a couple of places and have not gotten a real response. The reality is, putting aside debate and politics and even logic..
The NCAA and conferences have committed to following public health guidelines and mandates. In truth, of course, they didn't really have an option. Given that, as we see in MLB, there is no way teams will be able to keep playing given an outbreak. As we have seen in the preseason, outbreaks have and will continue to happen. And that's before we even get into liability.
Again, this is not about my or your opinion of how dangerous the virus is or if we're overreacting as a country. It's just the reality right now.
Given those truths.. How is anyone supposed to realistically get through a football season?
Team sports can function inside a bubble (or at the very least a highly controlled system). It's been proven with soccer, NBA, NHL, etc. Baseball is your hybrid and they've stumbled out of the block, time will tell if they can get it together or not. For CFB, a bubble isn't realistic, as the best case scenario, you could create an on-campus bubble for the team, but all the teams won't be in the same location, so there is still travel involved. That's before you even get into the whole amateur vs. professional issues with putting them in a bubble. As you stated, I don't think there is really any way for CFB to make it work when all the factors are considered. As you said, not devolving into the politics or debate on COVID itself, there is just no real way for a college (most of which are publicly funded institutions) to take on the logistics, additional costs, potential liability, and everything else to try to make this work, especially with the bad optics if something goes wrong.
My point is more along the lines of those who are actually buying into the concern for player safety being the main driving force. This is a financially driven business decision without a doubt. It was easy for the MAC to go first. We all run in the red to begin with, now you lose all the guarantees, any revenue from home games, AND you have to absorb all the additional costs of testing, oversight, travel, etc.? P5 may take longer to get there, since they have bigger budgets and more revenue on the line, so their math isn't as quick of a no-brainer as it was for us. The "safety" line is simply a better spin than saying "we think we're going to lose too much money so we're not going to play" especially when it's public institutions running "amateur" athletics.
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