With millions of dollars of resources unavailable to the general public, college football did the impossible and sucked at preventing Covid-19 outbreaks like everyone else.

In the MAC, for example, Miami and Ohio Universities likely required hundreds of thousands of dollars of testing resources in order to play a season. Their reward was three games each. They didn’t even get to play each other.

The popular arguments for playing football in 2020 were bullshit. Rapid testing is a game changer! Nope. Actually, the players are safer with the football programs than back home! Really?

College football’s mistake was thinking it could handle the pandemic better than others. It acquired valuable testing resources allowing schools to implement a patchwork web of safety protocols designed to stop outbreaks. Some schools, like Boston College, succeeded. Others, like Wisconsin, failed. The end result generally was the same as for anything else we tried to do in large groups this year: a lot of people got Covid-19.

The fact that there was a perfectly fine option on the table to play in the spring is insult to injury. The MAC and Big Ten got it right initially, and their wager that it would be safer to play in the spring likely would have paid off, given what we know about the Covid-19 vaccine timeline. But instead of college football taking center-stage in a national celebration of America’s triumph over the pandemic, it chose this:

BREAKING: Michigan-Ohio State game is cancelled. https://t.co/5yspxMCM0n

They had to cancel a game that’s literally called The Game. Surely this would cause everyone to come to grips with the mistakes made. Of course not. Perennial victim Ohio State was, predictably, the story. By rule, the Buckeyes were shut out of the Big Ten title game due to playing too few games, but they were promptly accommodated and it was all a wasted debate.

The reason the conversation turns to this in the wake of a Covid outbreak at Michigan is because the season can’t work if it doesn’t. Nobody loves a good overcoming adversity narrative quite like football people, and if the pandemic can’t be spun into just another plot foil for the sport’s usual heroes (re: Ohio State), then it’s something that can’t be fixed by working hard and doing the right thing. That’s unacceptable in football.

The sheer boringness of the narratives this season is infuriating. With everything else going on in the world of college football the best storyline anyone can muster is the exact same as every season: arguing about Ohio State being in the playoff field.

Even the non Buckeye-centric narratives are boring. There’s still an argument raging over whether the playoff system is fair to the Group of Five. That issue is already settled. If schools like Cincinnati could make the playoff, then they never would have built the thing in the first place. It doesn’t matter if Coastal Carolina aggressively scheduled, the folks in charged lied about caring about that.

Centering the story of the outbreak at Michigan on the playoff lets people feel normal and ignore all of the uncomfortable stuff. Uncomfortable stuff like how Temple couldn’t even field a real team this year, leading Rod Carey to go as far as saying “Covid won”

Anything to not talk about the sick players. Here’s ESPN’s Bomani Jones talking to Slate about what’s missed when talking about cases:

“We basically work with the same pattern on all of these cases: A positive test comes in. That person always is either asymptomatic or has mild symptoms, because they just found out. So they’re catching it early and we find out about it when they don’t really exhibit symptoms, and then we don’t come back again until they test negative. We ask no questions in between, and nobody’s asking them how they felt or any of that stuff”

He’s talking about the NFL, but the same concept applies. Over 40 scholarship players at Michigan can’t play in a century-old rivalry game, and who is sick or how sick they actually are is mostly a mystery because it’s all reported as “roster issues.” Everyone moves on. Remember, it’s only about the playoff.

If an athlete doesn’t come out seriously ill on the other side, our consciences just move along. Actually, not even death stops us.

As this season comes to a close the folks that pushed hardest for a season to be played will do everything in their power to make people feel good about what was accomplished here. The phrase “considering the circumstances” will get quite a workout.

There will be a lot of grading on a curve. Most fans will play along. After all at the same time LSU was letting the virus run through its entire locker room, the Big Ten was getting pilloried for not playing. Priorities have likely not shifted much since then.

The teams that could barely get on the field will be glossed over. They were just isolated tragedies, after all. If blame needs to be assigned, why not the Covid-19 protocols themselves?:

A reminder that B1G's return-to-play timeline for COVID positives is 21 days - 11 days longer than CDC guidelines.And another reminder of our story from October about emerging heart data that calls that timeline into question - https://t.co/JFy2L0iDfV https://t.co/wynkPexktJ

All of this is done to ignore what a failure this whole thing was. The most sinister part in all this, and the most contentious by a mile, is how easily the risks posed to young, healthy people by the virus were waived away in August in support of bringing football back.

Former Temple running back and current Jacksonville Jaguar Ryquell Armstead was hospitalized twice, barely able to breathe. He is 23. Miami Hurricanes junior cornerback Al Blades has myocarditis and is done for the year.

Gods plan 🙏🏽 pic.twitter.com/XZtaK2oyP3

Outside of american football, Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba reported that he “couldn’t run” in the first game of the season despite being cleared of Covid-19. He’s 27.

A vast majority of athletes will be fine. Infected with Covid-19 or otherwise their careers will not be adversely impacted in the short or long term. That’s still a pretty messed up reason to force unpaid athletes to accept the risk they could end up in a hospital bed unable to breathe.

It’s not that people can’t or even shouldn’t enjoy the season. I plan to enjoy quite a few beers yelling about Western’s zone coverage this Saturday in hopes they beat Ball State and head to a conference championship game. I will absolutely celebrate the hanging of that asterisk-free MAC title banner at Waldo Stadium if it comes to that. But trust me, none of this comes without guilt.

We have to be honest about what’s happened here, and not let the conferences that made these decisions escape without facing some accountability. The Big Ten played so Ohio State could compete for a playoff. It should have to answer for that. The rest of the conferences that were just lesser financial dominos in that chain of events? They should have to answer for it too.

College football knew the risks, did the bare minimum required to feel more comfortable, and then pressed on. It did something extremely dumb and people got hurt, and while that in no way means we can’t enjoy it (since that’s basically college football’s default setting), we should maybe think more about who we’re willing to hurt in order to enjoy our Saturdays.

I keep coming back to the cancellation of the Ohio State-Michigan game. The story couldn’t remain that one of the richest schools in the country, home to one of the top medical systems on the planet, had a Covid-19 outbreak so severe they couldn’t field a team for the only game that matters. We’re going to look back and wonder why the hell we tried to do this.

College Football Wasn’t Worth It was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The SEC told players on a conference call that “we’re going to have cases on every single team in the SEC. That’s a given. And we can’t prevent it.”

We can’t prevent it.

It, of course, is Covid-19 infections. These are the people that are supposed to care for and protect these student athletes and they, like the person currently leading our country, have taken the fatalist position of “shit happens.” What leadership.

The players, because they are smart college students and some of the most talented humans in our country, see through this bullshit. Players in the PAC-12 have taken the opportunity to remind everyone that they are not paid for their efforts in bringing in millions of dollars to their respective universities, and that they should be before they play in a pandemic (and also generally). At Washington State, taking this position is seen as “an issue.” To Nick Rolovich, the issue isn’t your safety, it’s that you feel unsafe and also feel like saying so.

In the Big Ten, the players have not demanded compensation in the way their PAC-12 counterparts have. These players just wan’t their schools to ensure they can be safe while playing in a pandemic, and that should they have expenses related to Covid-19 that they are made whole from it.

They want better contact tracing, improved safety protocols and guaranteed scholarships for those who opt out or are unable to play due to the virus. They asked for whistleblower protections for reporting violations. The players had to ask for all of these things after the Big Ten produced its plan to begin a season. None of this is acceptable.

Players are already getting sick and it’s having an impact on their bodies

Bro coronavirus is real 👎🏿.. i was 256 now I'm 229 because i lost my appetite and it's hard to eat plus you can barley breath. You can't smell food you can't taste food or taste any liquids.. stay y'all ass in the house https://t.co/kYERGuW38M

That’s LSU linebacker Travez Moore, who lost almost 30 pounds fighting the virus in addition to not being able to breathe. Contracting a respiratory infection of this severity in the middle of a football season will be devastating and, if the SEC is to be believed, unavoidable. We can’t prevent what happened to Travez from happening to literally any athlete that returns to campus in the fall. What the hell are we doing here then?

By pushing forward with the college football season under these current conditions, we’re telling athletes that are sick, will get sick or could get their families sick, “too damn bad.” You see, these universities who are ostensibly committed to being institutions of higher learning are so dependent on college football’s unpaid labor to function that the thought of postponing the games — even when it’s been deemed unsafe in some cases for students to return to campus — is seen as impossible.

Morally speaking, it is difficult to make college football even more corrupt than it already is, but pushing on with the fall season is about as bankrupt as this enterprise can get. It really pulls the curtain back on what this is all about. There’s this idea that America needs sports right now as a panacea to the existential dread we have about the world around us, but until we fix the world around us the dread will only find us where we work, where we live and where we play.

There are sports being played in this pandemic, even safely, but to pretend that this sport is remotely similar to the professional sports leagues is to be ignorant on purpose. The NBA is held up as the gold standard of how to do this but at its best it is a dystopian mini-nightmare with fan reactions streamed into empty seats in the stadium like an episode of Black Mirror. We have to ask ourselves that if the best outcome here is empty stadiums, no tailgates and fake crowd noise, is the imminent danger of the athletes we say we care about worth it?

Of course it’s not.

College football games and college football stadiums become their own functioning city for a few hours on Saturday (or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday), and just like cities with empty streets these vacant places that would otherwise be teeming with people are not beautiful. They are not examples of our ability to adapt in times of crisis. They are haunting monuments to a society’s present failure, and we should reject them until we’ve done the work required to make things right.

We should reject all of this. The health of not one single college athlete is worth it. The SEC is wrong. We can prevent this, just not in a way that makes everyone money. Well, everyone, that is, except the athletes.

Opt Out was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jahneil Douglas is from Toledo (Start HS) and went to Toledo. He was a junior, defensive lineman looking to add to his 12-game career this season. The story of what all happened Tuesday night outside of Gino’s Pizza is still developing, but here’s what we know so far:

• Police say a fight broke out between two men outside of the restaurant, and Douglas was shot around 11:30 p.m.
• Douglas died at the hospital that night.
• Bullet casings were found in the parking lot, and one car was also hit.
• Douglas’ killer was on the loose for almost a full day, but Toledo Police have arrested a 24-year old man and has been charged.

Last month, it was Western Michigan’s locker room that received the awful news. Jamal Williams just finished his final year at WMU in 2019, and was shot and killed at the Munster, Ind. hospital he checked himself in to.

At an organized demonstration outside of the hospital a week after Williams’ death, his sister gave a speech to the crowd of protestors and talked about why her brother checked himself in as a psychiatric patient in the first place:

Williams’ sister, Imani Williams, delivered a tearful speech.

“My brother came to Munster Community Hospital willing and ready to receive help but instead was met with an overzealous security guard who chose to shoot him in the head,” Imani Williams said. “There were no warning shots. There were no medical professionals there to sedate him. My brother’s life was taken without a second thought.”

Imani Williams said her brother was deeply troubled by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and began to struggle, but hadn’t been angry or aggressive.

“Last month several black men and women were wrongfully killed at the hands of police officers and bigots,” she said. “Jamal was so hurt by what he had seen. It hurt and confused him even more when some of the people he called friends didn’t sympathize with him or even care about what happened to George Floyd. My brother was no fool. He knew as every Black man, women and child knows that George Floyd could have been any one of us. With these new and scary thoughts and flood of emotions, Jamal started to break down and we could see it.”

I’m tired of this. Every time a young athlete dies unnecessarily, I fill up on sadness. I’m tired of seeing young black men (regardless of their athletic feats) die at the hands of someone with a gun. I remember what Demarius Reed’s death in 2013 meant to the community in and around Eastern Michigan, and I know that his memory still means everything to everyone he made smile along the way. I can only imagine that Douglas' death matters just as much to Toledo, and Williams' to WMU.

Demarius Reed’s life matters.

Jahneil Douglas' life matters.

Jamal Williams' life matters.

And it’s up to every single one of us to prevent these stories from ever happening again.

Say their names: Jahneil Douglas, Jamal Williams was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Officially COVID free🙏🏾

It’s great that McGee (and others) were able to catch and have it treated early enough before it spread to too many others during football (and during non-football activity). It’d be even better if other schools would’ve tested everybody upon their arrivals too. Looking at you, Toledo, Ball State, and Kent State. (Akron’s not back yet, but the Zips are on watch).

EMU’s Freddie McGee III had COVID-19, but now free of it was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From the many, many offices across Football Bowl Subdivision leagues and the TV networks they work with, this two-paragraph joint statement was published:

Collectively, the conferences and television networks have agreed to an extension for determining college football’s early season game times beyond the standard June 1 deadline.

These kickoff times and network designations will be announced at a later date as we continue to prepare for the college football season.

The original schedule that social media departments were going to initially play around with reads that we’re currently 100 days away from college football programs beginning their seasons on Thursday, September 3. The MAC’s representing team that day is Ball State to play host to Maine (FCS). Football programs alike would’ve had to finalize their kickoff times for early-season games by June 1, but that deadline has been extended to an unknown date for an unknown period of time.

Early Season Game Time Deadlines Extended was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yahoo! reporter Pete Thamel broke Wednesday’s big news of the day in the world of college sports. Football and basketball players (both men’s and women’s) will be allowed to participate in voluntary practices at the beginning of next month.

— Sources: The NCAA Division I Council voted to approve voluntary athletic activities in football, MBB and WBB to start June 1st and go through June 30th. There had been a moratorium on that through May 31st. Other sports will be acted on on a later date.

Few things to keep in mind:

• It’s still up to the conferences to decide whether or not schools may have formal practices.
• It’s still up to the schools to decide whether or not students are allowed to come back to campus.
• It’s still up to the state governors to decide how socially distant the people in their states have to be from one another.
• I have not seen any school at any level introduce a plan to fight against the coronavirus for when students and faculty all come back to their respective campuses.
• We still don’t have a coronavirus vaccine readily available in the United States.
• Last week, this same NCAA extended its recruiting dead period through June 30. Dead period means coaches may not have in-person contact with recruits or parents.

The NCAA might say “sure” here, but the NCAA isn’t actually the ultimate deciding force for coaches and college kids to live by. There are a lot of other things that have to happen before college sports (not just these three) can begin again, and there isn’t just one person or one group to give that final nod of approval.

This is just one (still big) decision that the NCAA made by talking to and serving the self-interests of the universities that it’s made up of. I’m of the mindset that the NCAA probably would’ve included volleyball, soccer, field hockey, and other sports in this update if enough schools would’ve vouched for them.

NCAA OK’s Voluntary Workouts, Beginning June 1 was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Central Michigan meets the FBS requirement for 16 hosted sports, but having only five men’s teams is an issue.

Central Michigan cut its men’s track & field team today, which should save itself $628,798 in projected long-term savings. This is the fifth MAC team cut in less than a week while schools watch their fiscal years end during a global health pandemic. On Thursday, Akron cut men’s cross country, men’s golf, and women’s tennis teams. On Friday, Bowling Green cut its baseball program — which leaves the MAC with just 10 baseball teams.

From CMU’s press release:

This decision directly impacts 36 student-athletes, which includes some student-athletes who also compete in cross country. Two full-time assistant positions also are being eliminated.

Scholarships for current men’s track and field student-athletes — including scholarships awarded to new students beginning in fall 2020 — will be honored for the duration of their CMU academic careers. Student-athletes who would like to join another institution’s roster will be released without penalty and are free to transfer immediately.

While CMU still has 16 total varsity teams to mean the bare minimum for the football program to be Football Bowl Subdivision-eligible, but it falls below another threshold. NCAA Division I Bylaw 20.9.9.1 says that FBS-classified teams must have a minimum of six all-male sports or mixed teams, and a minimum of eight all-female teams.

Central is down to five men’s teams with Tuesday’s news. To stay FBS-eligible, CMU needs either a waiver from the NCAA, or a sixth men’s team. CMU athletic director spoke with the media more about the school’s decision and said that the two parties have been in contact for a while. What Alford’s selling is that CMU wouldn’t have cut men’s track without knowing that it’d have to apply for a waiver to keep its FBS classification. He’s also saying CMU wouldn’t have applied for a waiver if it didn’t already think the NCAA would give the thumbs up here.

“That waiver has been submitted. They meet weekly, and I anticipate an answer pretty quick.” (-CMU athletic director Mike Alford, Detroit Free Press)

CMU looks like it’s confident in this move, but there’s really no precedent for this. Maybe Central might be in the clear once the NCAA makes its decision, but that’s anybody’s guess at this point. If the NCAA says yes here, how many other schools will follow suit and cut sports just to apply for the same waiver? If the NCAA says no here, what will the Mid-American Conference’s response be?

When Akron and Bowling Green cut their respective sports, the schools came prepared with their vocal commitments to staying in the MAC. CMU’s prepared FAQ page didn’t mention the league’s name once.

After Men’s Track & Field Cut, Will CMU FootStill FBS Eligible? was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s becoming increasingly likely that college football has a season in 2020. However it’s equally unlikely there will be any fans in attendance when the season does begin. It’s also unclear whether the season goes on as scheduled or if another option is available, like playing a conference-only season. The impacts to the MAC if both fans and non conference games are postponed could be tremendous.

On fans attending games in the fall, the MAC has a complicated situation like anyone else. The conference spans five states, each with their own timelines for returning to “normal.” Most notable among them is Michigan, which has the fourth-most COVID-19 deaths in the United States. On May 15th, during her weekly COVID-19 news conference, governor Gretchen Whitmer stated that “sports is not over,” but added that until there’s a vaccine, there will be no capacity sporting events this fall.

Governor Mike Dewine of Ohio, where a majority of MAC members reside, told the Toledo Blade that college football can “figure out how to do a season,” but was noncommittal on whether fans would be in attendance. Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker has taken a similar tone, believing sports are possible this summer and fall without fans in attendance. and New York governor Andrew Cuomo seems to be on board with playing sports soon. Indiana is more bullish on people being able to attend events.

Safe to say the MAC plays in empty stadiums, at least to begin with.

The folks in charge of college football seem confident enough in their ability to play a season in the midst of a pandemic that is, at the time of this writing, claiming over one thousand lives daily in the United States. Doing so will require some robust safety protocols and adequate capacity for testing athletes and coaches regularly for Covid-19. Let’s hope the folks in charge are right — the alternate world in which the football rollout is totally mishandled is far too grim.

Just when the season actually starts is anyone’s guess. We likely won’t know more until June, but the PAC-12’s situation could hold the key. California has postponed all in-person instruction for its university system until 2021. Los Angeles County has extended stay at home orders until August, directly impacting USC and UCLA. Commissioners have suggested the possibility of limiting the schedule to conference only, limiting Covid-19 related travel concerns brought on by the non conference schedule.

In a world currently dominated by fears of the deadly virus, the college football season could be forced into an October start to allow universities enough time to effectively prepare for the season. This would also alleviate any competitive disadvantages caused by schools playing empty home games in states with extended stay-at-home orders while others have semi-capacity crowds. The primary concern is how to decide who goes to the College Football Playoff if a conference-only season occurs, but the MAC is unburdened by such concerns due to being one of the worst conferences in FBS in terms of football quality at the moment.

A MAC-Only Season Could be Fun, Despite the Financial Woes

The scenario in which fans are prohibited from stadiums in addition to a conference-only schedule is likely the MAC’s second-worst outcome behind just cancelling the season outright. The conference enjoys a television deal with ESPN, but the member institutions rely heavily on the guaranteed money that comes from playing schools in the power five conferences.

Kent State, for example, raked in $4.5 million in guarantees for playing Arizona State, Auburn and Wisconsin a season ago, which accounts for 10–15% of its overall athletics budget. In the 2017–2018 season, five MAC schools ran deficits and the remaining conference members did not generate more revenue from operations than were allocated in subsidies or student fees. Losing the guarantee games will exacerbate the problem significantly.

Throwing in lost ticket revenue on top of it all is just an extra burden for the MAC to take on (Western Michigan is especially hurt here as it has a power five home game against Syracuse on the schedule in addition to playing at Notre Dame). When all options are considered, this is a dark background upon which to stage a MAC football season, but the MAC could potentially do some things to make the season more fun despite it all.

The running joke with the MAC is that it shouldn’t be too dismayed by playing in empty stadiums, since it does it every November anyway. There’s something to this in 2020, as the thing we all poke fun at the conference for has just become its super power — if any conference is prepared to stage a television event without a ton of spectators, it’s the MAC. The suggestion: The lean into the chaos and convert every 2020 conference game into MACtion.

This blog will rarely, if ever, extol the virtues of MACtion, whose television success is questionable relative to the attendance tradeoffs and has made it nearly impossible for member football programs to build the local fan base and keep it interested, but 2020 could be its time to shine. If there are not going to be fans in attendance anyway, what is the downside to moving all games to Tuesday and Wednesday nights?

ESPN would have the final say in this, of course, but giving America football every day of the week in the fall after America was fearful most of the spring and summer that the season wouldn’t even happen at all could really put to the test the MAC’s ability to get eyeballs to ESPN when not up against other football games.

The 2020 college football season is going to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and the MAC could be a big part of making it memorable despite all the ugliness surrounding the conditions under which the season is played.

Preparing for (and Embracing) a MAC Football Season Without Fans or Non Conference Games was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After winning the Mid-American Conference West division for the fourth year in a row (2–2 in those MAC title games, lost to Bowling Green in 2013), Northern Illinois started the 2014 season in unforgettable fashion.

NIU spent the summer teasing fans with these Cornfest-edition jerseys to be worn in the season opener at home vs. Presbyterian (FCS). Black helmet, black jersey, red pants, and everybody’s last name was DEKALB, but the most glaring feature of these was the shoulders that look like corn. There are other features to point to in the uni set, but I cannot stop staring at the shoulders on these things.

Do you like it?

Rate This Uniform: Northern Illinois’ Cornfest Jerseys, 2014 was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Quarterback Taulia Tagovailoa announced yesterday that he chose Maryland through this year’s NCAA Transfer Portal.

Tagovailoa played in five games at Alabama as a true freshman, so he still has a redshirt year to give. Of course, he’ll apply (if he hasn’t already) for a waiver to compete right away in 2020.

I have my own reservations about what college football will look like in 2020, if at all, but here’s why I’m bringing this discussion to Free on Saturday forum. Maryland, with or without young Tagovailoa, has some Mid-American Conference teams lined up for the immediate future: Northern Illinois in 2020, Kent State in 2021, and Buffalo in 2022. If Tagovailoa has to sit out this season and wear a redshirt, he’s eligible to play through 2023, but no there aren’t any MAC teams set to make the College Park, Md. trip that season. Toledo will go to Maryland in 2024, and Maryland will go to NIU in 2025.

Tua never got to play against a MAC team in his three years at Alabama, so it’s good to know that league only gets the chance to be torched by just one Tagovaiola brother.

Taulia Tagovailoa vs. MAC schools through 2022 was originally published in Free On Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.