If any other multi-billion dollar business in America were run as poorly college sports, it would be ripe for a hostile takeover. If any …
If any other multi-billion dollar business in America were run as poorly college sports, it would be ripe for a hostile takeover. If any other company’s leadership was as divided, absent and frozen in the face of big decisions as what we’ve seen over the past few days in college football, its stock price would’ve sunk so low it would be in danger of getting tossed from the NASDAQ. Monday’s series of confidence-shattering crises has left college football looking like a squabbling royal family trying to heal its wounds and missteps by inserting pick axes into each other’s necks while millions of people pick sides and root for busted arteries. And that was before the politicians started getting involved. Whatever the fate of the 2020 college football season — and more on that in a moment — the process in getting here has been an utter embarrassment to everyone except the players, who clearly want to play and deserve answers for why the momentum among many college presidents is moving the other direction. They’re innocent in all this, and yet their absence from the conversation about what conditions would make college football even possible while COVID-19 rages has been notable and counterproductive. This one is squarely on the adults, who have offered no unified message from conference to conference or even school to school, no backup plan if the season can’t be played in the fall and offered zero specifics on what constitutes acceptable and responsible conditions to play a season. The lack of focus has enabled them to fritter away time, offer empty platitudes and false hopes and now — when it’s time for some real decisions to get made — move the goalposts just far enough to confuse everyone about what’s going to happen. Even if you believe the Big Ten is doing the right thing by moving toward a cancellation of fall sports as early as Tuesday, the fact that the decision-makers started to pull the plug over the weekend — which happened just a couple days after the league debuted its 10-game, conference-only fall football schedule — is a patently absurd about-face.
