Confession: When the coronavirus pandemic began to sink in as an entrenched reality of American life in the second week of March, I immediately thought that in the absence of a vaccine, a full college football season would not be played this year. I have emphasized in my writings here at Trojans Wire that I wouldn’t foist predictions or insistent demands upon you, the readership, because in a crisis such as this one, readers need explanations of contexts and possibilities, not a constant stream of hot takes and pound-the-fist-on-the-table declarations of how things must be. You need information which helps you process situations, not a voice from on high telling you how you ought to think.
I share my original and private prediction about college football in 2020 in order to underscore one basic point: “Normalcy” left the building when the pandemic hit.
When certain people flatly said online in the wake of the pandemic, “There WILL be a college football season,” as though the full amount of games would take place, I was angry at those people… but not because I abhorred the idea of football (or any sports) being played in a pandemic. I abhorred the idea that “normalcy” could be imposed on a situation which was anything but normal.
“No matter what, we’re going to do what we have always done,” seemed to be the thrust of that particular argument.
That is what I found so infuriating, this insistence that normalcy will occur no matter what. That is exactly the kind of thinking civilized, responsible societies cannot have.
“Let’s get back to normal” is an honest sentiment. It is a very human sentiment, particularly in a crisis. Yet, it’s not the right mindset. Crises require an ability to calm the populace, yes, but not as a result of — or in conjunction with — telling them everything’s just fine, thank you.
No — calming the citizenry in a crisis must occur alongside the grown-up, responsible, mature ability to tell citizens that a crisis does in fact exist, and that significant adjustments (and where necessary, sacrifices) must be made to promote and protect the common good. Insisting that normalcy can continue is the great lie people tell in a time of crisis. That respects no one’s intelligence, for one thing, but what it also does is that it makes people less inclined to trust that sacrifices and inconveniences will need to be endured in the next crisis down the line.
This leads me to a point I have been slowly trying to reinforce in my columns this week at Trojans Wire: If we do play sports — especially college football — we can’t be led to expect it’s going to be normal. This means we shouldn’t be concerned with the legitimacy of any championship if a championship is able to be contested in any sport (in an NBA Finals, a Stanley Cup Final, a World Series, a Super Bowl, or a College Football Playoff, if any of them happen). This means conventional views of game scheduling, travel logistics, fan attendance, and roster size (among many other things) have to go out the window. They certainly can’t be clung to.
I said earlier this week that sports are making an attempt to play games in a pandemic for two and only two reasons: economic and psychological. The economic reasons are obvious; all leagues or other entities need TV money to significantly reduce financial losses. The psychological reasons are evident as well: People need a break from bad news, and they need a release valve which is appreciably wholesome… and not nearly as damaging as looting or overdosing on drugs or alcohol. Sports are far from the most important thing in our lives right now, but that doesn’t mean they AREN’T important. They ARE… but they’re part of a much larger and more complicated picture.
One can recognize the importance of sports, AND realize they’re not nearly as important as people having enough food to eat and enough comfort to maintain some sense of peace, AND realize that the importance of sports is not chiefly found in having 100 percent of star athletes playing games.
I keep raising this hypothetical because it is likely to emerge if we do play sports, and because we have to really absorb what it will mean if it does come to pass: What if a superstar player or coach gets COVID-19 and has to isolate for two weeks of crucial games?
As I noted earlier this week, the legitimacy of a championship is something we shouldn’t be concerned with. We’re playing these games (or at least, we’re trying to do so) for the economics of industries and universities, and for the psychological comfort of Americans. If we can grasp that overarching point, we can then arrive at this basic realization, which we might know in the back of our minds but needs to become a thought we absorb at the forefront of our awareness:
We’re playing these sports for the cameras.
This is a reference to TV money, yes, but it’s also a broader reference to the point that we just need something to distract us.
Sports do contain powerful, inspiring, gripping moments which — for many of us — form the sweetest, most cherished memories of our lives. There are times when sports reveal humans at their very best, and give us towering moments which unite generations within families, and larger city communities in a milestone. Two prominent examples: Cleveland’s 2016 NBA title, the first major pro sports championship for the city since 1964, or the Cubs’ World Series from 2016, a massively cathartic moment for generations of Chicagoans.
As a sportswriter, I know well — and have taken the time to celebrate — the power of sports. In complicated lives, when so much else has been wrong, sports have sometimes been right, piercing through the darkness. Sports have provided poignant, life-changing, community-building experiences, in spite of their injustices and flaws. There is plenty about sports which is ugly, but in a single transcendent moment, we cast aside that ugliness and remember why we fell in love with sports in the first place. There is obviously a powerful urge to want sports to be THAT kind of presence in the midst of a pandemic. It’s an honest and understandable desire…
… but it’s a desire we shouldn’t have right now.
If we do manage to play sports and decide championships in this second half of 2020, there won’t be many fans in arenas. There won’t be that euphoria — or hatred — in the arena which gives sports a big part of their visceral emotional power.
If LeBron James or Nick Saban gets COVID-19 and misses a huge game(s), we might still root for or against the Lakers or Alabama, but a big reason for fans’ rooting allegiances will be removed, and it won’t quite feel the same.
It won’t be sports as we have come to know — and love — these vibrant, emotion-drenched contests. In empty arenas or barely-occupied stadiums, the central sensory experiences of sports — the roar of the crowd, the presence of every main character, be he a hero or villain — won’t exist.
We could view those as deficits, and if we did, we wouldn’t even be wrong… but you see, that’s not the point. Not in 2020. Not in this unprecedented situation.
The point of playing sports in a pandemic is not part of a powerful and dramatic narrative of uplift and teaching life lessons, all the romantic things we believe about sports in their best moments.
The point of playing sports in a pandemic is two-pronged: to reduce revenue loss and give Americans a pleasant distraction for a series of evenings and/or weekends. If your expectations led you to think America needs a fully normal (or even mostly normal) version of sports as we have known them for decades, with minimal disruptions or alterations to a familiar and well-established experience of viewing sports going back to one’s childhood, you have been led in the wrong direction to the wrong endpoint.
We’re just playing for the cameras this year, if we do in fact play. The sooner we all accept that and downgrade our expectations, the better off we will be.
If we can get back to some semblance of normalcy by 2021, we would be very fortunate to reach such a point in our nation’s overall trajectory.