Everyone in college sports was waiting to see what the Pac-12 Conference would do on Tuesday.
The Big Ten was reported to have postponed fall football early Monday morning in an article by the Detroit Free Press, but that report did not turn out to be true. The Big Ten didn’t arrive at a decision or vote on Monday, dragging this unprecedented drama into Tuesday.
Then the Big Ten did in fact shut down fall football early on Tuesday afternoon. That’s when it seemed almost certain the Pac-12 would follow suit.
The Pac-12 had, after all, followed the Big Ten in terms of developing a conference-only game schedule one month ago. The Pac-12 and Big Ten don’t face equivalent situations as leagues, but many of their actions have paralleled each other during this pandemic. When the Big Ten — at least temporarily — did not choose to postpone fall football on Monday, the move raised hopes that the Pac-12 would do the same.
However, Tuesday’s news from the Big Ten made the Pac-12’s decision a near certainty.
Now we have our answer: The Pac-12 will not play college football this fall.
Pac-12 has canceled fall football season, source told @Stadium. “We’re done,” source said. Official announcement at 4:30 p.m. ET
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) August 11, 2020
You can applaud the decision and view it as the necessary one to make. You can rip the decision and view it as an act of buckling to political pressure in this polarized, confusing whirlwind of indecision and disorganized college sports leadership. I’m not here to say that one side is right and the other is wrong. That doesn’t help anyone or anything; it’s also unfair, given that citizens should not be criticized for being given bad choices due to failures which reach far higher than college sports.
Ripping a fellow citizen for a political viewpoint in a pandemic and economic meltdown, all while the federal government has manifestly failed to give ordinary citizens the same generous benefits and protections of the elite corporate class, is a narrow-minded thing to do. It also helps that very same corporate class, which wants working people to remain divided over differences which are often cultural and regional in nature.
Criticizing each other for political views is easy. Like most things which are easy to do, criticizing a fellow citizen — while not focusing your energy on improving the quality of government (and elected leaders) at the federal, state, and municipal levels — doesn’t do anything.
Let’s remember that GOVERNMENT, not individual citizens such as your nextdoor neighbor or your CNN-watching mother in law, failed to address the national problems which have affected college football and thousands of other industries. Your annoying Fox News-watching uncle didn’t create this problem; government failure and paralysis did.
So, let’s not get too deep into the weeds here with the Pac-12. The choice the league made is entirely debatable, but this mess was several months in the making. It started with government. It most centrally manifested itself in college football not in — or through — a single conference such as the Pac-12, but through the collective failure of conferences and school presidents to work together to create a better situation for athletes.
It matters that we properly assess how this terrible situation emerged and worsened. Structures and systems, not individual citizens, made this happen.
If you’re mad we’re in this position, urging structural change — not empty cosmetic alterations or superficial tweaks — is what we need to make sure the college sports industry can be sufficiently repaired.