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

Jazz Nuggets. Sounds like something that needs a towel.

 

We’re
Not
Living
In
Normal
times.

What is college football supposed to do? Just give up billions in TV rights and harpoon each school’s non-revenue sports because a few Saturday games might affect how many eyeballs watch LeBron? And baseball probably won’t even be playing due to yet another labor stoppage which will turn off even more fans. If ever you were gonna switch seasons, this is it.

 

Nothing's perfect.
The problem with going January through April is you lose all the top prospects. Trevor Lawrence can't possibly play that close to the draft. The health impact involves running two seasons in the same calendar year.
But starting a traditional fall season and stopping would be demoralizing. I'd understand if they're reticent to start out of fear that they'd have to shut down.

 

Shut it all down. Tell America, "we can't play sports until there's a vaccine." World will keep turning. Stop trying to turn yourselves inside out on a blue sky venture. I understand all sports people are psycho competitive and hate the idea of being a quitter worse than anything, but there's also such a thing as the sunk cost fallacy.

 

This is hubris.

 

I don’t really disagree. But I’m thinking outside of athletes and coaches. So many jobs depend on sports. Such a huge industry.

There’s no good answer. I think MLB, NBA and NHL are going to try and hope cases are limited. There have been positive tests on PGA Tour, NASCAR and euro soccer and it’s going ... OK?

Things are so complicated here because of the abject fucking stupidity of so many people in this country.

I don’t know if any of these leagues will get to play again in 2020. College sports are even more dicey.

But it is a larger issues than egotistical athletes not wanting to quit. Lotta jobs on the line.

 

And when will there be a vaccine? A proven one that makes it "safe" to play? Two years? Three? Ten? Ever?
What do the people working in the sports business do in the meantime, while waiting for a day that might never come?

You want to focus on it being "just a game" and the highly-paid athletes who have banked some big contracts. There are a hell of a lot of people, though, who rely on sports being played to make a living. Plenty of folks on this board included. Media. Training. Stadium workers. Security. Coaches and teachers. The young players who haven't made their big money yet. People who have invested years of their lives into learning this as a profession. You want to tell them all to go screw themselves, and a multi-billion dollar industry — maybe a multi-trillion dollar industry, when you connect all the tentacles that attach to it — to go out of business because it's "not essential."
You want to tell thousands of people that their careers are essentially over. Not laid off, not furloughed, not "go find another company to work for." Over. Because their industry is gone, or at least put on an indefinite hiatus.
Forgive me if I disagree, and if I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing it.

 

I think it may end up being a practical, competitive-related matter.
I'm not in favor of shutting it down right now, but consider this: If an NFL team has five players test positive during a game week, what are the sequestration policies? How many must quarantine? Everybody who came in contact with any of them? What positions do they play? And how long must they go into relative hiding? That ripple effect could invalidate a team for a week.
If it happens to somebody else a couple of weeks later, the image problem is compounded.
Same questions in the NBA.
Is it better to try and fail? Or is the psychological and financial toll of starting and stopping best avoided in the name of hoping for normalcy at a later date?
Mike Trout doesn't sound like a guy who's excited about the season and all it entails for him personally. I don't blame him.
If the Freddie Freeman situation doesn't spook players across sports, it should. The guy is healthy until he arrives with his teammates. Suddenly starts feeling sick. Tests positive. He has been suffering from several symptoms in the past couple of days. Previously healthy, durable and now confined to quarantine.
If the worst-case scenario happens, that sucks. But let's not pretend it's all the fault of the athletes who opt out. We don't know enough yet. We know the bigot in chief in the White House denied the existence of this thing and let valuable time go to waste, but we may never know if a responsible, experienced politician willing to listen to experts would have stopped it in time for the total normalcy of sports.
While calls for immediate stoppage of re-start plans may be premature, they come from a good place: the relative protection of public health. None of them is motivated by a desire to shut sports down just to make Trump look bad.

 

There does seem to be a divide on this issue related to age/money made.

A lot of my older sports colleagues in their 60s don't seem particularly concerned if sports come back anytime soon. They made their money. Had their careers. I don't blame them personally - I wouldn't want to risk my health if I was in a high-risk group either. But I do find it strange that many seem to be unaware/uncaring of how people in their 20s, 30s and 40s are having their entire lives upended for potentially years. Some might never really recover financially. And that's in a best-case scenario where things are back to somewhat normal by 2021.

It's the same way with MLB players. Sure, Ryan Zimmerman, David Price and Felix Hernandez don't really want to risk it. That's cool. I get it. They've also made $100 plus million in their careers and don't really have anything to prove. It's a little different for others.

 

I would like to clarify that my position is based strictly on the logistics of sports. I'm not criticizing the leagues who're trying to start on any moral ground. They're trying to do what they do. Who wouldn't? But I just don't think it's possible without incidents happening that force them to stop again shortly after starting, and that strikes me as worse than pulling the plug themselves and admitting the difficulties are just too much.

 

The amount of money aside, and this may not be the best comparison, but what do you think happened during the two world wars? And nobody knew when the wars would end.

Players and everyone else were told they had to sacrifice their careers for the bigger cause. In WWI, Baseball was told it had to shut down for the duration of the war and ended the 1918 season a month early. They just got lucky the war ended two months later.

In WWII, the owners were preparing to shut down, and FDR encouraged them to keep going for morale. The difference, though, was that nobody was risking their lives and health by playing or risking their lives and health by attending games. That’s not the case here. And yet, plenty of players lost years of their careers, or never were able to come back.

I want sports to return as much as anyone. But we need to be smart about this. The bottom line is that if an athlete dies from this, we know it all shuts down. All of it.

 

The reason sports were allowed to proceed during all of the country's 20th century wars was as a means of showing the populace that US soil remained safe from enemy attack. Today, the enemy is all around us.