It isn’t a news flash that Americans are living in uncertainty. We know this in the forefront of our minds. Life has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic. Life as we once knew it feels like a very distant memory. February of 2020 seems like several years ago, even though it is only six months.
So, why the emphasis on uncertainty, one might reasonably ask? This is one of those situations when everyone in the room might be aware of something, but the fact or reality still has to be pointed out so that it sinks in.
Yes, we know in our minds that we are immersed in uncertainty, but even then, the reality of that uncertainty has to be explicitly mentioned. Why? In order to pound home the point that normalcy isn’t just around the corner. That isn’t meant to depress anyone or become a doom-and-gloom voice. The point of mentioning unpleasant realities is to get more people to accept them.
Acceptance is not the same as approval. Acceptance isn’t an endorsement or an attempt to promote something. Acceptance most centrally refers to the act of acknowledging things as they are, not as one wishes or hopes they would be. Acknowledging things as they are — without trying to manipulate a situation, without straining to find a positive spin — lowers expectations and therefore enables a person to be less ambushed by bad news. Being sold on an optimistic view of a situation can lead to an emotional crash when that optimistic view turns out to be a set of false hopes sold by a huckster of ideas.
We don’t want emotional crashes right now, especially with so many Americans plunged into stress, depression, and misery.
USC football isn’t the most important thing in our lives right now, but it isn’t unimportant, either. It is worth taking one minute to stop, pause, breathe deeply, and consider the vast world of the unknown the Trojans are entering.
Will the SEC, Big 12, and ACC play college football? If they do, could that have an affect on USC’s recruiting outside the Western United States?
Welcome to a world of uncertainty.
Will USC play in the spring? Doing so would reshape the calculus of Trojan football and the tenure of head coach Clay Helton. Spring football before a fall season would provide untold complexities. The future of college sports would be dramatically influenced by the spring-or-no-season decision college football administrators will soon have to make.
How much financial pain will universities with fewer resources than USC endure in the coming 12 months? How will any of this affect the college sports world in which USC and its football program reside?
We know everything around us is profoundly unknown. Yet, only when one asks some specific questions does the enormity of our collective uncertainty emerge in a fuller context.
For many of us, life — like college football — has never felt so completely up in the air, like a blank tablet waiting to be written on by the course of human events in real time. It is an extraordinary place for USC and everyone else to inhabit… just not for the right reasons, at least not yet.