“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” — British economist Ronald Coase
I suppose we should have anticipated that the BIG 10 Conference — having 14 member institutions — might have trouble adding things up.
Some close observers have commented that the BIG 10’s leadership only got serious about saving the 2020 football season after watching two weekends of televised games involving other schools, notwithstanding that more than a dozen scheduled games had been postponed due to COVID. For BIG 10 leaders, this added concern for the loss of reputation to their existing concern for loss of revenue; and they calculated that — by hook or by crook — the 2020 season had to be salvaged.
It’s hard to justify this about-face for breathe-in-your-face football. . .at least by any other rationale than the over-riding concerns for reputation and revenue. Remember, some call the BIG 10’s brand of football “smash mouth.”
One week ago –Sunday, September 13th — marked the worst day for COVID cases worldwide since the pandemic began, according to the World Health Organization: 308,000 new cases, with India, the US and Brazil leading the way. It bogles the mind that on that same day — and the following three days — the prestigious presidents and distinguished deans of the Big 10 Conference would consider for one minute — much less for many hours — reversing their earlier decision and voting to expose players to some semblance of a football season this fall. The reversal defied the data on which the league’s leaders claimed to depend.
Management of COVID had NOT gotten better. The seven-day moving average for new COVID cases was two to five times greater than it was last June in the states within the BIG 10’s footprint. Nationwide, more than 196,000 people had died from COVID; and current CDC models projected US death totals would nearly double by the date in January when we’re supposed to celebrate the devil-may-care commercialism of college football’s national championship game.
Across the BIG 10, most students had been banished from campuses by their institutions, and most non-football athletic activities had been suspended, and half the league’s football teams had paused workouts at one time or another because of athlete or campus-wide COVID outbreaks. The resumption of Big 10 football is supposed to be dependent on daily rapid testing of players, a benefit NOT available to the regular tuition-paying students who had been kicked off campuses to make it safe for football. At what are supposed to be educational institutions, none of this adds up.
The BIG 10 likes to believe it is better than the rest of big-time college sports, operating on a higher ethical and academic plane than the other leagues. But here the BIG 10 has only proven that it might not be any worse than the others.
JER
ALL OVER THE MAP 