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

Alma seems mad because his Baal - college football - is being blown up.

 

Dabo says This Is Gonna End Real Soon because this is Amurrica. We have the best people.
The theory might work if the president was among those outstanding public servants or if he hadn’t ignored the issue.

 

['takes his Baal and goes home' joke goes here ____]

 

Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner, said on CNBC this morning that there's next to no chance there will be large gatherings allowed in the fall. He wondered how many people would go to them even if they were allowed. He used business conferences and movie theaters as his examples. Didn't mention sports, but didn't have to, really.

 

Amid pandemic, some people get pissy if you suggest their amateur sport is disposable trash.

 

Professional golf may be the one sport that can work without fans through this whole mess. The operation is so spread out over such a large area. The only essential personnel are the players, caddies, rules officials and TV personnel. But professional golf is so dependent on sponsorship money that one wonders if companies will continue to stay on as title sponsors if they can get no bang for their buck, so to speak.

Just think it's too early to be making grand proclamations one way or another on what the near future will look like. We may be in a better position by the end of the month to do so.

 

I was thinking watching the 2019 Valero Open at times over the weekend that there was a sponsor who got no bang for their buck this year. But many events are sponsored by the financial services industry (insurance included). Those still advertise bigly during the pandemic.

 

Fair point. It'll be the charitable organizations tied to specific events who will take the bigger hit.

 

I was SID at a Sun Belt school when Denver and Florida International were both members. (Most) road trips in that league sucked, because we couldn't afford to charter, so we were flying out of the local airport to a larger hub then on to somewhere else. And there were many eight- and nine-hour bus trips. Those were really fun, especially coming home after a Saturday night basketball game when we had lost both games on that Thursday-Saturday swing.

 

Even if an entire season is cancelled, CFB will be back. Some of the sports it supports? Maybe not.

The bigger fear is universities themselves, if classes go online in the fall and there's virtually no room and board to collect. Coupled with the budget cuts that will inevitably be handed down by state governments next winter, higher learning is looking at quite a blow unless we start to examine how we can come back by fall.

 

I don't want to be like these asswipes on social media rubbing their crystal balls and telling us nothing is ever going to be the same that it once was ... but nothing is ever going to be the same that it once was.

"We'll see" - but I expect college to become something like it was in my father's day, where only the moneyed can go.

Among other things this has also shown us the utter folly of Bernie's platform.

 

It also can't be ignored that college football attendance was already in about its fourth or fifth consecutive year of decline before this.