We’re Getting What We Deserve

Beginning in 1989, Hank Williams Jr. became the musical mouth of the NFL’s Monday Night Football telecasts, asking Americans: “Are you ready for some football?”  And then Hank sang a variation of his hit, “All My Rowdy Friends are Coming Over Tonight.”

Hank and his entourage were suppressed for awhile (2011 through 2016) for his  comments linking President Obama to Hitler; but he made a comeback in 2017 which lasted until this fall, when his raucous theme song was finally benched…..removed from ESPN’s mostly empty stadium telecasts. It must have dawned on someone that it wouldn’t be right during a pandemic to be singing “All My Rowdy Friends are Here on Monday Night.”

For most of two decades, football fanatics had come to expect hearing Hank’s question at the start of every Monday night telecast. And they felt some excitement. But this year, fans should probably be asking, “Are you ready for some COVID?” And they ought to feel some dread.

Even with their unlimited resources, NFL teams have proven incapable of keeping the virus out of their locker rooms: more positive COVID tests than final scores for Week #4 of the NFL season; before the next week’s games, five NFL teams were reporting positive COVID tests; by Week #6, a sixth team…..and so on to the absurd.

The NFL has upped its fines and doubled down on its protocols. It has rescheduled games, and then rescheduled them again, and still again. And yet the Denver Broncos embarrassed themselves and undermined any integrity that remains in this NFL season by playing without a quarterback last Sunday.

And everywhere outside those inadequately insulated NFL locker rooms, the signs are sure: the predictions of the pandemic’s nationwide autumn surge were right on schedule; the predictions of post-holiday spikes in the already surging rates of positive tests, hospitalizations and deaths appear to have been, if anything, too conservative. Now it is projected that there will be nearly a half million American deaths due to COVID by February’s Super Bowl Sunday! 

Nevertheless, as if exhibiting the impaired brain function football critics alleged during the sport’s most previous public relations disaster, the major college football establishment stumbles along like sheep to slaughter…..first three conferences, then five, then more…..like lemmings over the ledge. Never mind the health risks…..let’s do it…..and in so doing, let’s lavish on privileged athletes endless and expensive precautions that are denied to regular tuition-paying students, many of whom have been hustled away from their contracted campus housing and have no other place to live. Nothing  can be allowed to corral this cash cow…..the college football juggernaut.

There already have been 108 COVID-related cancellations or postponements of games in major college football during this truncated 2020 season. Telecasts reveal that in almost every case where crowds of any size have been allowed, hundreds of spectators have been ignoring both social distancing and effective face coverings, assuring campus contagion. COVID already has been so bad on and around some college campuses  — including the BIG 10’s Michigan State University and University of Michigan — that their administrators are already suggesting that the 2021-22 academic year will begin without in-person academic classes for most students. But football? Well, full speed ahead.

Can’t play contact sports in Santa Clara County, California? No problem: the NFL’s Forty Niners have relocated to Phoenix, Arizona for two weeks (where the COVID rate is higher than in Santa Clara County); and Stanford’s football team is practicing in Seattle, Washington this week and Corvallis, Oregon the next week.

If you’ve wondered why Americans have lost confidence in leadership, it’s because responsible leadership is so hard to find and so briefly lasts. On the other hand, after observing selfish, tone-deaf antics of football zealots on all levels, and the irresponsible actions on college campuses (from the student body to the board room), and the futility of the NFL’s prevention efforts, football fanatics may be getting precisely the lightweight leadership they deserve.

However, other people — those who believe that pre-mature action to return to life-as-we-knew-it before COVID has been the most certain way to prolong the pandemic, deepen the damage and delay life-as-we-want-it — are NOT getting the leadership WE deserve.

JER