If you haven’t heard by now, the Wisconsin Badgers’ game this weekend against the Nebraska Cornhuskers has been canceled due to…
If you haven’t heard by now, the Wisconsin Badgers’ game this weekend against the Nebraska Cornhuskers has been canceled due to rising COVID-19 numbers within the Badger football program.
The game, per Big Ten rules this year, will be a “no contest” and will not affect either teams’ place in the standings.
Related: How Wisconsin canceling the Nebraska game affects the rest of the season
Those who have paid attention to the Big Ten since August know the saga that the Nebraska football program has become–calling for the conference to reinstate the season, players suing the conference, the Big Ten then giving them a gauntlet of a schedule after reinstating the season and now this.
Now, anybody with any understanding of COVID-19, the Big Ten rules, Barry Alvarez and Paul Chryst as competitors and the Wisconsin football program as a whole would see Saturday’s cancelation and understand that nobody within the program wanted this to happen.
Some people down in Nebraska, though, don’t see that as the case.
HuskerSports, the Twitter account for a prominent radio station covering the Cornhuskers, tweeted a poll last night that they have since deleted.
The question: If the roles were reversed and the Huskers had 6 players and 6 staff members sitting out with positive tests, would the game be played Saturday?
When I saw the poll around 8:30 p.m. the results were 70 percent “yes” and 30 percent “no.”
So, in simple words: the station and those who follow it believe this is just another instance of the Big Ten being “out to get them” since they would’ve played the Graham Mertz-less Badgers.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a comical take.
Yes, maybe the Big Ten gave Nebraska games against Ohio State, Wisconsin and Penn State in the first four weeks of the season as a result of their parents suing the conference (and I don’t even believe that to be the case). But to actually believe that the game was canceled because Wisconsin didn’t want to play or the Big Ten didn’t want to see Nebraska succeed? That is a take that lacks any understanding of reality.
And, furthermore, to think that Barry Alvarez, one of the most competitive people in the conference, would find a way to cancel a game because his top three quarterbacks were out? It honestly might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
If the Badgers were healthy and had no risk of spreading or contracting the virus, the game would be played. That, unfortunately, is not the case.
Related: Opinion: The eight-game, eight-week schedule was never going to work
Here were some of the best responses last night to the station and its fans who don’t understand what a COVID-19 outbreak means to the chances of playing a game:
To make things even better, the Cornhuskers even tried to schedule a game for Saturday against Chattanooga that, obviously, ended up getting shut down by the conference.
I don’t think I have any more words to say about this, but I’ll close with the comment that HuskerSports deleting their tweet was a sound move. Maybe they realized the insanity of the question they were trying to ask.
