When Alabama beat Ohio State in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday night, I felt a sense of relief. Not because I’m an Alabama fan (I’m not!) but because, for the first time in my life, I’m happy the college football season is over.
By misguidedly forcing a season through the global COVID-19 pandemic, college football in 2020 (and the first few days of 2021) felt extra exploitive, far more than usual. Because, of course, it’s all about the money.
College football is one of the sports I cover, so I still watched tons of games this season. But without fail, I watched each one through a veil of guilt. I felt guilty wondering if the players I watched would test positive, become ill or suffer longterm side effects, many of which still remain unknown, all while unable to earn any compensation off their already dangerous labor.
Would someone have to be hospitalized? Would they die? Would they survive but have to endure myocarditis? Would they unknowingly pass the virus onto someone else who might experience any or all of these things?
College football has always prioritized money over the health and safety of anyone near it. Playing through the pandemic made that crystal clear for anyone still harboring doubts.
The sport brings countless people immense joy sometimes, but having a season in the middle of a pandemic isn’t something we should be celebrating, especially as everyone but the players profit from it. You didn’t need to share the guilt I felt even when watching the latest incredible play to recognize that perhaps this season shouldn’t have happened. You can’t look at all the canceled games and positive tests within programs and call it a success.
At the time this was published, more than 22 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in the U.S., and almost 400,000 people in this country have died from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Daily cases and death totals continue to break records, and for the people who don’t lose their lives because of the coronavirus, “recovered” doesn’t always mean being 100 percent healthy. There are more consequences to contracting the virus than dying or not dying. It’s not that clear cut.
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The NCAA is requiring schools to cover athletes’ COVID-related medical expenses, but what about when potential longterm effects of the virus emerge? Sure seems likely that future former college athletes will be left to figure that out themselves.
Specifically in college football, everyone wanted to play this season, and players, parents, coaches and fans relentlessly argued in favor of it. Well, the coronavirus has prevented people from doing a huge number of things they want to do because it isn’t safe, smart or responsible — especially during a year when the federal government’s monumental failures exacerbated the spread.
Alabama Crimson Tide fans flood the streets of Tuscaloosa after the team secured its 18th national title. pic.twitter.com/k9UCH8BC4m
— James Benedetto (@james_benedetto) January 12, 2021
However, it hasn’t stopped everyone from doing what they want. As people like Louisa Thomas in The New Yorker and my colleague, Chris Korman, have written, college football and sports in general have offered fans an escape and a sense of normalcy when nothing is normal. But that, too, has consequences, like downplaying the seriousness of the coronavirus and encouraging people to congregate as it spreads uncontrollably. The post-championship celebration in Tuscaloosa was an extreme example of that as many mask-less people flooded the streets, leading to the hashtag #RollCOVID.
So college football — even if some conferences started a little later than others — carried on through its reckless season. Despite protocols, dozens of games were postponed or canceled this season for COVID-related reasons, and it eventually reached the point where cancellations became commonplace and barely newsworthy.
“We are putting ourselves through [expletive] so white people can be entertained. It’s all [expletive] corrupt,” an SEC player told The Daily Beast in a story published Monday. Included in the same story is this quote attributed to a Pac-12 player:
“[N]o one follows the guidelines that closely. How are you supposed to remind your coach to keep his distance? Or to put his mask up? Some of them don’t take this as serious, it’s business as usual. That takes a toll on your mental health. I think a lot of people outside of the facility have this idea that everything is fine and normal since we are back playing, but it’s not the same.”
Yes, fall athletes could have opted out of this season, though some may not have felt they had a real choice, and everyone gets an extra year of eligibility regardless of how much they played this season.
But the fact of the matter is that thousands of COVID cases emerged in athletics departments, and while there’s no way to determine how many more people tested positive because seasons persisted, it’s reasonable to think the numbers might have been lower if college sports had just pressed pause.
Like they always do, the NCAA, conferences, programs and bowl executives prioritize lining their deep pockets with money made off the backs of unpaid players, who get barely anything even though they’re the ones generating millions of dollars in revenue. As USA TODAY Sports‘ Steve Berkowitz reported in July, Power 5 conferences brought in $2.9 billion in combined revenue with the Big Ten reporting the most at a cool $780 million.
And not much changed just because there happened to be a deadly pandemic raging across much of the country and world.
Perhaps we as a society are all guilty of prioritizing sports over COVID-related safety, and there’s no need to look any further than the venue for the national championship game as evidence of that. Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens is one of the Miami area’s largest COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites, and it halted its services Monday for the game. And that’s all while Florida set a record with almost 112,000 new cases last week, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Just because people have run out of things to watch on Netflix and are desperately thirsty for a distraction from COVID-19 doesn’t mean their entertainment should be delivered at the expense of “student-athletes,” who are already massively exploited by the current system. They can’t even capitalize off their own names, yet.
A recent New York Times article declared UConn the real 2020-21 national champions because the Huskies opted not to have a season — and then stuck with their decision. The story became a punchline in college football circles because no one’s actually going to call UConn the national champions, but it was among the programs that sided with science and logic. I’m willing to bet years from now when we (hopefully) know exponentially more about COVID-19, the UConn joke will be forgotten, and people will be further perplexed by how many teams enthusiastically took the field during a deadly pandemic.
We should remember that, faced with the loss of revenue weighed against the safety of players, UConn did the right thing. But it likely won’t resonate the way upsets, undefeated records or last-second thrillers did. Such is the nature of sports.
It just should have been different this year because everything else was different this year.
I love college football, and because of that, I, along with my colleagues, regularly argue for ways to improve it. We push for changes to benefit the players taking all the risks to give them more power, options and some of the money they produce for everyone else.
They took the risks this year to make this happen. They sequestered away from family and friends to make this happen. They reported to empty campuses while their classmates studied remotely, and, as the Daily Beast story reported, it negatively impacted some players’ mental health.
Nobody should be celebrating the fact that a college football season was jammed into the middle of a pandemic, but if we don’t take away from this season the realization that athletes need to be treated more fairly, then we have truly lost.
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