Dan Wetzel, one of the best sportswriters in the United States, noticed — along with everyone else — the saliva test funded in part by the NBA and Yale University. The SalivaDirect test, if it is the real deal and meets the targets the company thinks it can hit, would indeed be a massive step forward not just for college sports, but for colleges and schools of all kinds. It would be a big improvement for the United States in the country’s attempt to better contain the coronavirus pandemic.
The creation of this new — and cheap, and easily accessible, and fast — coronavirus test doesn’t guarantee that a college football season can and will be played. There are so many issues to sift through right now, and there are so many complexities which vary by state and region. More on that point a little later.
Nevertheless, the creation of this new saliva test obviously gives the SEC, Big 12, and ACC a credible piece of good news which could be used to save the college football season. This at least gives the three remaining Power Five conferences a chance to play football. No guarantees, but a real chance. Even the Sun Belt, Conference USA, and the AAC are still in the game, so to speak, in terms of playing football. Could the Sun Belt play football while the Pac-12 is on the sidelines? Right now, that is still a possibility. It’s not a likelihood, but it IS a possibility.
Wetzel’s column asks the obvious and necessary question: Did the Pac-12 — along with the Big Ten — pull the plug on fall football too soon?
It would be irresponsible to say that the Big Ten and Pac-12 are obviously wrong, just as it would be irresponsible to say they were obviously right.
This is much less a story about one or two conferences, much more a story about how the larger college football industry has no central leadership, no main guiding presence, no unifying figure, who could get the Power Five conferences and — in truth — all 10 FBS conferences to act in concert with each other.
Yes, the Big Ten was out of step with the other conferences, and the Pac-12 has followed the Big Ten to a conspicuous extent. Those two points can and should be noted; this is not an attempt to exempt the Pac-12 or the Big Ten from blame here.
However, if blaming individual conferences is your end conclusion, your final and most significant point of emphasis, think bigger.
Why was any individual conference — or perhaps the Big Ten and Pac-12 as a pair — allowed to break from the pack in the first place? The conferences should have all been operating on the same plane. They haven’t been. It has been “every conference for itself,” a shamefully fragmented reality which is now hurting college football more than ever before.
The other big point to note, briefly alluded to earlier in this piece, is that the state and regional realities attached to the coronavirus are different. The governors vary, the political calculus of each locality varies, and above it all, the lack of money flowing into states (and individual citizens — where is that second round of stimulus checks, anyway?) provides a limitation which creates bad choices for local leaders.
That last point is so critical: In a time when government hasn’t responded effectively to problems, local leaders are faced with impossible choices. There is no choice between a really good outcome and a bad outcome; choices almost always require local politicians to identify the “less bad” outcome and separate it from the worse outcome.
Did the Pac-12 pull the plug too soon? Maybe it did… but the reality on the ground in the state of California, which includes four Pac-12 schools and obviously involves the most travel-based and recruiting-oriented needs for the various schools in the conference, is so thorny right now that the league — headquartered in San Francisco — saw a set of obstacles it didn’t think it could overcome.
That doesn’t make the Pac-12’s decision right. It does make the Pac-12’s decision understandable.
The bigger picture, though, is that a little leadership in college sports could have gone a long way toward preventing this mess.