SALT LAKE CITY — Although it was no surprise to most, a lot of folks — football players, coaches and fans alike — had to be extremely disappointed by the official news from the Pac-12 Tuesday that there would be no football games this fall.
No football, no tailgating, no popcorn and Coke, no arguments about whose team is better ... what are we going to do this year from Labor Day until New Year’s Day?
“We all recognized this was the morally correct thing to do and we did it.” — Oregon president Michael Schill
The Pac-12 became the second Power Five conference to shut down all fall sports after the Big Ten made its announcement a couple hours earlier Tuesday. It followed the decisions of the Mountain West Conference the day before, the Mid-American Conference two days before that, the Ivy League a month ago, and the FCS and lower-division leagues in between, not to play football or any sports for the rest of the calendar year.
Meanwhile, the SEC, the ACC and Big 12 are holding on for now, along with a few other conferences as well as independent BYU, trying to find a way to put together a football season this fall.
We’ll see how long they last before joining the Pac-12 and other leagues that have gone dark for the next 4½ months.
But give the Pac-12 credit for doing the right thing and choosing medicine over money. The league is going to lose millions of dollars, from TV revenue and ticket sales, while hopefully keeping its athletes and coaches as safe and healthy as possible. They showed there are more important things in life than football — life for example.
Oh sure, many people still downplay the notion that the coronavirus is dangerous, especially for younger people. We’ve been hearing that for months now from some, who if they’d taken this COVID stuff more seriously in the first place, we may not be facing the prospect of no college football, or a depleted season, for the first time in over 100 years.
The Pac-12’s press conference Tuesday included commissioner Larry Scott, who ironically has recently recovered from COVID-19, Oregon president Michael Schill, Arizona State athletics director Ray Anderson and Dr. Doug Aukerman, a sports medicine doctor who is the associate athletic director at Oregon State.
The decision by the Pac-12 was a long time coming and not influenced by the Big Ten or any other conference, according to the four who spoke to the media in a Zoom call. Meetings among conference presidents, athletic directors and other officials have been held on a regular basis ever since March and the decision to shut sports down for the rest of the calendar year was well thought out, but unanimous, according to Schill.
“We all recognized this was the morally correct thing to do and we did it,” he said.
The fact that half the conference schools are located in California and Arizona, two “hot spots” in the country right now for the coronavirus, was a factor in the league’s decision to act now.
As Aukerman said, “We were really concerned that coronavirus is very prevalent in many of our institutional communities and by the metrics that are out there it is not well-controlled. There is emerging data about some health risks that affect young athletes, specifically cardiac effects of COVID infections that we don’t know enough about so we became more concerned about that.”
Aukerman was referring to myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, which can cause heart damage and sudden cardiac arrest. A report on Monday said “at least” five Big Ten athletes were found to have the condition, potentially caused by viral infections.
Another factor worth noting is how the virus has hit minority communities particularly hard. Many college football teams consist of a large percentage of minorities, which is true at the University of Utah, with Polynesians and African Americans comprising more than half the team.
So while we all would love to be spending our Saturday afternoons watching football, either at the stadium or on our big-screen TVs, we just need to be patient for a few months and hope for a spring football season or wait until the fall of 2021.
Anderson put it well. “We want to play in the worst way, but not at the risk of the health and safety of the athletes. We’ve done this with their interest in mind from Day One, and will continue to do so, led by the science and medicine.”