I like this Twitter filtering service that Brian provides. It keeps me from wading through the tweetstorms and general sturm und drang of twitter for the 1% of tweets that are newsworthy.

Much better than twitter.

Possibly better than some University Presidents or ADs.

No hate here from me for you.

I don't hate you at all.

Could someone provide the name of said movie, you know, for not-watching purposes?

Look I think when ppl here spring football, they assume that it will be from March-May. However, some reports have it going from Jan-March. The NFL draft is not until April, and some were speculating the other day that if could be pushed back as far as June to accommodate college football.

*Maybe* the NCAA, conference commissioners, university presidents, Athletic Directors, and coaching staffs were all quietly gaming out various scenarios for months & eliminated a bunch of possibilities after thoughtful discussion back in April & May, but....

....it sure doesn't seem like it to me. From the outside looking in, it seems like the vast majority of the stake-holders just sat around for a few months hoping someody else would map everything out, or that somehow this whole thing wouldn't be a big problem. And now that it's the 11th hour, they're all running around trying to come up with various solutions in an ad hoc manner.

If this true, I am utterly baffled by this behavior.  These people are collectively involved in a BILLION dollar industry. Some of them have get paid several million dollars per year to oversee their league/conference/school/team. Many of the players/parents have hopes of potentially making generational wealth in the future, but much of that hinges on the ability to stay health and to also showcase their talents on a large media platform like nationally televised Power 5 match-ups.

I understand being lead-footed in maybe March when the Pandemic was getting off the ground. I even understand the conferences & schools maybe being a bit lead-footed in April when it became clear the NCAA wasn't going to take any major leadership role in issuing a bunch of comprehensive guidelines or policies.  But once late April & May rolled around, why in the HELL didn't conference commissioners (or school presidents, ADs, & football coaching staffs) start to come up with a bunch of contingency plans?

I know that Pandemics are unpredictable, but at the very least they could have gamed out the most likely 5-6 scenarios & set up plans for each one. Then, as events unfolded, focus on the top 2-3 scenarios looking the most likely. 

For example:

• I'm shocked the conferences didn't scrap the non-conference schedules immediately & stand-up some 3rd party entity to do the testing & reporting of COVID tests to the conference administrations so they could create more consistent COVID saftey standards within the conferences back in May/June.
   
• I'm shocked that the players/parents didn't roll out their "concerned citizens" groups in March or April asking the excellent questions they started asking in July.
   
• I'm shocked that many university presidents, ADs, and football staffs didn't seem to have internal discussions back in April & May to get memorandums of understanding between themselves about what the school would do RE: football depending on what 4-5 likely scenarios developed by July or August. At least that way, each school would be able to act as one unit when late-breaking events happened just before the season.
   
• I'm shocked that the schools or the conference commissioners themselves didn't game out what happens if conference votes became split & some teams didn't want to participate but some did. I'm actually surprised the NCAA or individual powerhouse schools didn't explore the legal & regulatory possiblity of setting up 1-2 season temporary "unity conferences" to accomodate schools that wanted to play but became "athletically homeless" if their own conferences decided not to have a season.  For example, the most hard-core 3-4 programs in the Pac 12 & Big Ten could decide to suspend their Pac 12 or Big Ten membership for the year & join the "Resolute Conference" (or whatever) for a single season in the event their own conferenced refused to schedule/host games. You'd think they could do that in May/June and also negotiate some Letter of Intent for some quicky & dirty media rights agreement for any "unity conference" games, but only move forward with it if the permanent conferences in fact decided to not host a season in the fall.

It just seems like not ALL, but A LOT of people with any clout stood around and were waiting for somebody else to be the primary mover & decision-maker in many of these things.  Which tells me many of these entities either:
 

1. Are just very poor planners in terms of risk management & anticipating future challenges; or
    
2. Intentionally let things drift along in an unfocused fashion because they thought it would give them some type of strategic advantage in the end.

Just totally blows me away.  Yes, the Pandemic is/was a fluid situaiton. But when you're running a billion-dollar industry that significantly influences tens of thousands of lives, the answer isn't to do very little planning until the very end, it's to plan MORE in order to accomodate the larger variety of scenarios that might unfold.  

Maybe they did a ton of this war-gaming & hypothetical scenario planning back in April & May and we just didn't hear about it. But by the way this stuff is playing out in the media, it sure feels like a bunch of this stuff just wasn't discussed in any comprehensive manner ahead of time.

Nah, more likely is the "12-2" vote is technically correct (e.g., it was athletic directors or medical advisers), but did not involve the actual school Presidents, who are the only ones that matter.

It could have even been like what you often do at the beginning of a discussion in a jury room, "Ok, let's see where we are at -- how many of you think Guilty and how many of you think Not Guilty?" but that isn't the final vote. You're just getting the lay of the land to determine what work you need to do to come to a final decision.
 

I understand your argument there, but what are the risks for student athletes to have that happen to them anyway? Its not like they have 0% chance of getting covid if they don't play. You might even argue that most teams would hold their athletes to a much higher protection "bubble" if the season was going on than if the season was canceled, so their risks might actually be lower potentially (at least in Michigan's case from the words Jim used).

I think there would need to be some standard compliance as far as what student athletes would need to adhere to if they wish to play and stay active. That is much harder to manage across the board amongst all teams, especially where corruption is already an issue, but I think it's doable. And there would need to be consequences to teams who fail to adhere to those standards.

Yes, it's challenging, but the threat exists regardless. 

Pretty much every Big Ten school has a medical facility and staff to handle those injuries you mentioned. (Ignores Purdue, Wilton, etc.)

No medical facility in the entire country, or apparatus of government in the country, has shown they have COVID figured out.

How dare you bring reason, context, and decency into this discussion? Damn you.

This is a key metric IMO.

It isn't "Zero" vs "The risk of getting COVID if playing actual games this season." 

It's actually the marginal DIFFERENCE in risk that matters, which is admittedly much harder to determine.  For example, it could be one of the following comparisons---"The risk athletes get COVID if they play football games this season" within a whole bunch of scenarios like whether or not regular students arrive live on campus, what degree of a "bubble" does a school create for the football program, how frequently are people tested & how rapidly can they get results, isolate & do contact tracting within the program, etc.

Even when you narrow down the theoretical scenario of "risk an athlete gets COVID if they play games this year," the comparison isn't against "zero risk."  The alternative isn't all the guys living like monks hermetically sealed away from the world for a year.  They'll either live back at home for a year, or live on campus presumably among other students.  They'll likely still work out, maybe practice, & certainly attend house parties, live in/around cramped student housing, dorms, or apartment buildings, etc.

I'm not saying that they 100% SHOULD play football this season, but it's important to accurately acknowledge the pros & cons of each approach. I think a reasonable position is that these guys in some type of closely supervized living/practice situation might have a lot less COVID exposure to themselves compared to living "out in the wild" at their parent's home or living in a house/apartment/dorm on campus "playing school" like a normal student all year long, even if they're taking remote online classes.