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

I fee like this is deliberate. Hope it doesn’t backfire on Ol’ Dabo.

 

Ranger employees are terrified to go back to work

Rangers office staff 'terrified' as virus spreads

 

I just don’t know if we’ll get sports. NBA starts July 30. MLB around July 23. That’s a good month of story after story of fears, concerns, considered boycotts, cases rising, media coverage of that, so on and so on.

I think you could see stars opt out of playing and that’ll trigger dominoes. If LeBron James says “not doing it” he would be, for one thing, branded a hero by the media. For another, he’d give cover for other players - who I don’t think really want to play - to do the same.

Baseball might be a little different - Mike Trout isn’t the bellwether of a league the way LeBron is - but I’m just not sure I see it happening.

If the NBA and MLB do get going, your Jeff Passans of the world stop writing about fearful employees - the news media is starting to function too much like a Human Resources office - and start writing about actual games.

 

Here's another gem from Zach "two million will die if we play football" Binney.

Briggs: Toledo athletics falls short on coronavirus testing

FWIW, it's actually a good story in a lot of ways, but the underlying last word is given to a guy who said, three months ago, 2 million were going to die if the college football season is played.

And the kicker line is more or less the prevailing notion from the media:

For as much as we all want a college season — and as much as every effort ought to be made to responsibly have one — it’s becoming hard not to wonder: Are we all just kidding ourselves?

 

Damned libruhls. Don’t they know they have an obligation to bring sports and The Economy back?

 

You’re omitting a detail. Binney said we’d have 2 million dead if we did nothing at all.


“If people just decide to let it burn in most areas and we do lose a couple million people it’d probably be over by the fall,” says Binney. “You’d have football. You’d also have two million dead people.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.si.com/.amp/mlb/2020/04/10/sports-arent-coming-back-soon

 

Yep.

It's the same two million everyone modeled if nothing was done.

 

Couple things here:

>>You’re assuming you know what “burn through this” means.

>>At the time he said this - April 10 - the United States was in lockdown. We were not doing nothing at the time he said it.

Also, here’s the preceding lead-in to the quote, written by the author of the piece. (Who it should be noted does not want sports to come back anytime soon.)

“Bringing back sports soon would give people a reason to stay inside, a reason to feel hopeful. It would probably also cost more lives.”

 

What does “let it burn” mean? Seems pretty obvious to me. If your house is on fire and you let it burn, does that suggest that you have called the fire department? Does that suggest you have done anything to mitigate the disaster?

 

The latest thing I saw was kind of a backtrack from that. More like "they never fully recovered, so the 'second positive' was really just an extension of the first positive."

 

UnderArmour wants out of its long sponsorship and apparel deal with UCLA. The story I saw quoted a UA exec who intimated the company wasn't getting everything it had been promised -- with no specifics. I'm not surprised these might start to unravel.