Will COVID-19 be the needle that finally bursts the sports bubble?

We may not *get* a vaccine. While one was developed for MERS, there is still no vaccine for SARS.

Would you like to share a locker room with 85 guys? How would you feel about it if one of them was diagnosed the week after you did? Would you be concerned for your life, or your family's? Would you be willing to do it repeatedly so that the public could watch a ball game? Seems a stupid thing to risk your health over to me.

Yes, I get that they would be doing it for money. Again, each person will have to do the personal risk/benefit analysis. I doubt it happens anytime soon, and like so much about this, we have no idea how the pandemic will run or what the aftermath will look like. We're all pretty much pulling shit out of our hats when we try to talk more than three or four weeks out .

 

Your first sentence, coupled with your subsequent scenario, is why I suggested sports is in trouble.

Sans vaccine, infection perpetually looms, we project our own choices onto those of athletes, and political leaders, marching to the drum of public health leaders trained only to mitigate risk - which is what they should be doing! - can't bear the idea of letting people be responsible for what happens. So we get stasis. We get nothing at all for our inability to live in the tension.

It's kind of like, on the smallest, most insignificant scale, we got rid of the college sports video games a few years ago because a group of know-it-all authoritarian thinkers, led by Jay Bilas, deemed them immoral because college athletics hadn't figured out how to cut in student-athletes on the profits. Players loved the games. So did gamers. But we couldn't have them because a small segment of media society clucked its tongue sufficiently enough to shame college presidents into getting rid of them.

It's also like the weird, insistent argument this week that you couldn't possibly bring back football players to campus for practice when in-person classes weren't in session. Speaking in sheer logic, you're not going to convince me or most sane thinkers that LSU's 120 football players are safer scattered all over the country - with plenty in COVID-19 overrun New Orleans - than they would be two months from now after a 14-day quarantine, in sanitized dorms and controlled practice environments on an empty campus. If you isolated them, after quarantine, you can control that environment, prepare, take daily temperatures, and be ready to play the games. But such an approach is sacrilegious to the "don't move! don't group! don't even think about anything but coast-to-coast death, lest your thoughts infect a weaker person!" monastic doom aesthetic currently rolling over social media.

We'll see how long it lasts. The NFL, thankfully, is so entrenched (some say tone deaf) that Adam Schefter's "carnage in the streets!" rant was shrugged off. They had free agency - which went fine! - and they'll have the Draft, which will go just fine, and the world will march on. Schefter will even have actual work to do.

 

Yup. The world will continue to spin, and we will come to accept whatever the new reality brings us. I hope (lord I hope) that things get back to normal, but I don't count on that happening quickly. Otherwise I'm very much in the "wait and see" camp. I'm not really willing to speculate much when things are changing so rapidly around us. The reality we'll be adapting to has not developed yet.

 

T.I.G.E.R.S (This Is Gonna End Real Soon) is straight out of The Onion. Or so you’d think.

 

This is really well written. I don’t agree with it, but is a great read.

 

I honestly don't remember exactly what happened with the video game case, but wasn't it Ed O'Bannon who sued the NCAA and EA on behalf of the players? The media reported on that story, but I don't remember the media being the driving force behind that. It was O'Bannon.

 

The NCAA also views the idea of compensating players as the Rubicon that it isn't going to cross, under any circumstance. Like, those video game deals were potentially huge money for them, and they chose to just cancel them rather than figure out a way to compensate players. ("It would be difficult to compensate players properly, or to pay them, so let's not even try.")

With professional sports leagues, and especially the NFL... I don't know. The mortality rates are still high enough that I can't imagine professional players being comfortable with the risk. Some players will push to play, because they need or want the money, or because they don't think it'll effect them, whereas others, maybe they figure they have enough cash and don't need the risk - like we've seen with some guys and concussions.

 

Oh lord. There's no sports news. I'm seeing conference re-organization threads popping up.

OTOH, if conferences wanted to cut expenses by trying to make more geographical sense (see C-USA, SBC) this would seem to be a good time to do it.

 

Well, this is simple.

New Conference USA (westernish schools)
North Texas
Louisiana Tech
UTEP
UTSA
Rice
Southern Miss
Little Rock
Texas State
UT Arlington
Louisiana
Arkansas State
UL Monroe
South Alabama

New Sun Belt (easternish schools)
Western Kentucky
Charlotte
Marshall
FIU
ODU
FAU
Middle Tennessee
Georgia Southern
Georgia State
Appalachian State
Coastal Carolina
Troy
UAB

13 schools in each league. Had to split the Alabama schools somehow and Mobile is by far the most western of those schools. Let it be done.

 

Yeah, or N/S/E/W. Or something. C-USA is completely insane geographically and the Belt isn't much better.

OTOH, you're going to see some of the larger and more academically credited schools looking at some of those schools with major side-eye. Then is it two rearranged leagues or one G5 super league? And what about the various contract obligations?

 

Please let this happen.
Send Clemson and University-6 to the SEC, where they belong. The ACC will survive if that allows FSU to reclaim supremacy.

 

I can see this happening in the G5, not so sure about the P5. The time is right if they're going to try it though. Plenty of time to negotiate and implement it.

Mostly it's going to be message board cancer.