If #CollegeFootball doesn't happen this fall, then I believe you won't see it again until the fall of 2021 -- and that is after a good percentage of FBS athletic departments go under. Let me explain why:
Unless SARS 2 burns itself out magically and disappears as the first SARS did, there's no way on our current epidemiological curve it will be gone by February or so when this spring football season is supposed to start.
Without achieving herd immunity naturally or via a vaccine, the same pattern will repeat itself. Every time you bring people together that haven't been exposed to a highly infectious contagion, there will be a surge in new cases.
You are seeing this pattern in Hong Kong, Philippines, Australia, and several European countries previously given credit for their lockdowns. Once the lockdowns end, a new wave of cases begins when the reopening begins and unexposed people then get exposed.
And since the focus is all on cases (right now we are 5.1 million cases when we had 60 million H1N1 cases a decade ago), it won't matter if the new strains are weaker. Like we just saw with the Sun Belt wave that wasn't as destructive as the Tri-State wave. Fear of risk remains.
There's no way politically you're vaccinating college football players before the general population, even if a vaccine is ready to go by February. No politician will sign off on that outrage. Plus, it's still an improbably optimistic timetable for a vaccine as it is.
Not to mention, we're already being warned any such vaccine will be lucky to be as efficacious as the flu shot. Which means plenty of risk of contracting the virus remains, especially with February and March still peak seasonal influenza months in the northern half of the U.S.
And if you think the players are activists now, take an entire season this fall away from them only to ask them to play two seasons in 9 months. With no real reduction of risk of contraction come February, plus the wear and tear on the body. Good luck with that.
Thus, there is no reasonable expectation of liability deliverance come February, especially since that's still peak virus season in many places around the country. And you've angered the players further by taking a real season 99% of them want to play away from them.
No college football likely means no college sports this year -- period. If it's not safe to play outdoors, then how do 600 men's and women's hoops teams play indoors across the country during the peak influenza season? So bye-bye NCAA Tournament, again.
That tournament is at least 90% of the NCAA's budget revenue, just as college football is at least 75% or more of every athletic department's budget revenue. Can you smell the apocalypse? Welcome to the college sports Chernobyl.
And if you think politicians, regardless of who wins in November, are going to line up to give taxpayer bailouts to these athletic departments while we're still overcoming a loss of a third of our GDP, you're smoking a dangerous low-grade form of crack.
There's no way these athletic departments are getting bailouts right after they were claiming non-profit status, but still had the chutzpah to ask the U.S. Senate for anti-trust exemptions last month. Laughable lack of self-awareness.
So whatever liability these university presidents fear now will be dwarfed by the financial apocalypse their about to self-inflict. If they were worried about the players organizing before, guarantee it happens now. Shutting down college football won't thwart it, but make it so.
I know in their ivory towers with all their subsidies and tenure they believe you can live risk-less lives, and always find Utopian solutions. But here in the real world, where we're not all too big to fail and able to call tenure on our bosses, we know better.
These university presidents are about to learn a harsh lesson in the real world. They aren't going to prevent a catastrophe, but ignite one. This will be the college sports version of the Smoot-Hawley Act. These university presidents are about to Herbert Hoover themselves.
Come Fall 2021, college sports will return -- either because we've reached natural herd immunity the long way or the fear has subsided enough with a flu-like shot. But when it does, its going to look dramatically different. Highly unlikely that different is better. Systemic ruin.
In conclusion, these university presidents are about to prove, again, the worst decisions in all of human history are always made out of fear.
