The Prompt: No fall sports.

The Responses:

Ace: WHERE DO WE EVEN BEGIN?

Brian:

Michigan Hockey is proud to announce the addition of @Matty_Beniers10 to the 2020-21 incoming class!#GoBlue | #NewBlue 〽️ pic.twitter.com/Ndqyc6AYa0

— Michigan Hockey (@umichhockey) August 12, 2020

or were you referring to something else?

Ace: I was referring to the Moe Wagner/Giannis incident.

Giannis just got EJECTED after head butting Moe Wagner pic.twitter.com/BPJKneicOv

— Overtime (@overtime) August 12, 2020

Brian: Honestly I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to headbutt Moe Wagner. I mean this in the nicest possible way.

Ace: The only surprise here is it was the MVP and not, say, Draymond Green.

BiSB: Big Ten Twitter was very much on Giannis’s side.

Ace: Maybe Giannis is a low-key Purdue fan. Now, are we discussing these things because the outlook for fall sports is, uh, not great? Perhaps.

Brian: furk

Ace: We should probably begin that part of the discussion here: the Big Ten made the only right decision given the current circumstances.

BiSB: [a long silence ensues in MGoSlack]

[After THE JUMP: crickets……wait, CRICKET?]

---------------------------------------------

Ace: In a world where players are compensated and there have been stringent protocols put in place across the board, we may be in a different place. This isn’t that world.

BiSB: We can even be more specific: This was the only correct decision in a world where you have to rely on Rutgers.

Brian: I'm not sure that ending amateurism was going to do it, either. I'm dubious about the feasibility of a college football bubble even if limited to ~85 players since those players aren't going to be at one spot and some of them really want to party.

Ace: Yeah, even if the groundwork for this going wrong hadn’t been laid for decades (and decades), the general state of the country isn’t promising for any sport that can’t be contained to a bubble. It’s still not going well for MLB and I remain skeptical the NFL can pull off a season, and evidently several NFL players feel the same way.

Brian: Meanwhile I don't see how the YOLO conferences are going to accomplish this unless they go 100% fuck them kids. Even they're shutting down practices for outbreaks. When that happens during a game week, and it's going to, that week's game no longer happens, and probably the next week's game is right out as well.

BiSB: People apply the word “bubble” like they apply “RPO.” A true bubble makes a season workable, but a true bubble would NEVER be workable for college football.

Ace:

It’s not even workable for the NFL.

BiSB: If your bubble has to travel to another bubble, you’re gonna have issues. So, we’ve heard for a while that this was the inevitable result for the Big Ten. How much difference do we think the myocarditis news made?

Ace: A huge one, I think. I’ve said this a bunch on twitter, but: we don’t know the long-term effects of getting covid-19 yet, but we’re seeing some alarming early returns, and the uncertainty is a reason to shut down, not wait and see.

In addition to myocarditis, there’s also the presence of “long covid” in a number of cases, and that essentially presents the same way my illness does. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And it’s definitely not worth the risk just to get in a season of football. This is also, to Brian’s point, an example of the gung-ho conferences 100% going fuck them kids.

Brian: Even if you completely discard the "is this a good idea" aspect it doesn't seem feasible if you connect the following dots from the ESPN article on COVID myocarditis:

1. A German study with n=100 showed that 60% of recovered COVID patients had "ongoing myocardial inflammation."
2. Most athletes with myocarditis can "safely return to sports after a restriction of activity for three to six months."
3. The Big Ten already has more than 10 cases.

Given elevated COVID rates in athletic departments even before competition begins it's pretty easy to envision a version of the season in which nothing disastrous happens but big swathes of rosters are sidelined as a precaution, along with canceled games. And that hardly seems worth the trouble.

BiSB: It feels like the other conferences are looking for a better excuse for their fans. Not statistics and studies and fancy science-talk. They want to push forward until teams cannot answer the bell.

Ace: What I believe scared the Big Ten about myocarditis, and should terrify every conference, is it made real the possibility that a player or coach would have a serious cardiac event during a nationally televised game. I realize that’s deeply cynical, but here we are. We can’t see what happens to the people with covid. But, like, Hank Gathers is an indelible memory for a lot of people.

BiSB: We're already seeing some of it.

As an aside, it turns out those "is herd immunity Dabo's secret weapon?" takes aren't aging so well.

Brian: That's four CFB players who have publicly noted that COVID has done some pretty gnarly stuff to them, before the season's started. We're headed to 100+.

BiSB: It's also why a spring season doesn't seem exceptionally likely, absent a vaccine that gets rolled out in a super-efficient way.

Ace: Even then, you run into issues of playing two seasons in one calendar year with players who don’t have any sort of organized protection. At the very least, a spring season would probably have to be abbreviated.

BiSB: "Season" in this case is a generous term.

Ace: I mean, I’m still very much in the “school itself is not a good idea” camp, at least for in-person instruction. Which makes any of this really difficult to justify.

Brian: Guh all the stupid twitter takes on this. Michigan has already put as many classes as are feasible entirely online. They're refunding housing fees if you want to cancel. MSU is straight up saying "stay home unless you can't." Every university is caught in the same no-good-answers realm that football is and is taking as many precautions as possible.

And you are guaranteed to get some shades-in-car avatar rabbling about how "Justin Fields can't play football but he can sit in a lecture hall with 300 frat boys?!"

Buddy, Justin Fields didn't go to physical classes before COVID existed!

Ace: Also, while I trust high-level college athletes to be more disciplined than the average college student, the bar here is still “discipline of a college student.” I don’t even want to get into infantilizing, paternalistic bullshit like this:

Agree or disagree with Nick Saban? https://t.co/OXC5KXCzQ4 pic.twitter.com/sPxfsLoZVR

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) August 10, 2020

Seth: That "they're safer with us" talk is a red herring. At least regarding Michigan I have been told that any player who wants to remain on campus will be able to, and will have access to all the safety protocols they have now, regardless of whether there is a season.

Ace: It doesn’t come off to me as a great look to hold “you must play” over players’ heads to ensure their safety, so that’s good to hear.

Brian: Actually... I might believe that in the specific context of Alabama football. Nick Saban should have been put in charge of this from the drop.

Ace: Okay, fair, but the message still sucks.

Brian: It does. Michigan's cross-country coach nailed it though:

It wasn't just football that got the axe yesterday. Coaches of other fall sports at UM and MSU shared their thoughts on the cancellation.

I liked this from Michigan men's cross country coach Kevin Sullivan.https://t.co/OjVqdkeSap pic.twitter.com/a19IQDuOF6

— Andrew Kahn (@AndrewKahn) August 12, 2020

Ace: Yes. Other countries got this under control. The United States did not. That’s not on the players, but it does have consequences for the players. Which sucks! All of this sucks.

*bzzzzeeep*

BiSB: That's not true. Everything is fine. Nebraska will show you. They'll show all of us.

Brian: I tell ya, college football twitter the past few days has made it very clear why the US has the worst outbreak on the planet.

Ace: Because the media did it, right? The problems aren’t real until you talk about them.

BiSB: Or test for them.

[ /screeeeeeeeeetches up to the edge]

Brian: ...How are we supposed to follow the no politics rule when the politics literally cancelled football.

Ace: It’s very hard!

Brian: I'm gonna spend the next three months writing episode recaps of Deep Space 9. And it's definitely someone's fault.

*BLEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

BiSB: The most MGoBlog replacement would probably be UFRs of Civil War battles.

Ace: Speaking of which, we lost @seth.

Seth: I'm sorry...thing. Let me catch up?

Brian: It's okay you just got postponed.

Seth: You guys talked about myocarditis, specifically the likely risk of significant cardiac and pulmonary damage even to young people who don't feel major effects. It's also my understanding that these are preliminary findings. I know not everyone understands this to be a positive, but the science now might not be the science in a few months. So who knows; if the consensus changed would they revisit it?

BiSB: I suppose follow-ups of those kids four months from now might make a difference, but it would have to be a pretty finding to use it to justify a bastardized mini season. It's also hard to see how anything (short of a Big Ten Bubble) saves this basketball season.

Ace: That’s the one where giving up amateurism could’ve saved the day. Also hockey, given I’m watching an overtime NHL playoff game while typing this. The got-dang NHL can do this!

Gary Bettman!

Brian: I don't know that there's enough financial incentive to try hockey in a bubble, at least on the college level. It's a break-even sport where it does well. Basketball on the other hand could staunch a lot of the bleeding if everyone admitted that all basketball player classes were going to be online and there was some sort of compensation for being locked away from society for months at a time.

This will not happen and it's the thing I'm preemptively furious about.

Ace: I feel the same. It’s mostly pointless to add that hockey’s could be slightly more feasible because there are significantly fewer teams.

BiSB: But also significantly fewer resources.

Ace: And more players with obvious other pre-professional options.

Seth: The players laid out the most plausible roadmap literally in the 11th hour. The endgame is compensation but the short game could simply be all of the demands in #WeWantToPlay.

#WeWantToPlay pic.twitter.com/jvQhE7noGB

— Trevor Lawrence (@Trevorlawrencee) August 10, 2020

Ace: I think it’s too late to implement some of those. At least for the fall.

Seth: I want to explore what's less than a Big Ten season. I studied a lot of historical seasons and the percent that aren't farcical is smaller than anyone wants to admit.

Ace: Michigan twice played the D-III school my best friend played for about a century later. They count those.

Seth: Notre Dame played a hardware store. If Michigan can bubble 85 players and play Sr-Fr vs Jr-So they should do it. If they can play Michigan State, who for all our jokes has been responsible about this, they should do it.

BiSB: What would really make sense is to create a "Big Ten Teams We Trust" schedule, and play like five games.

Ace: It gets really tricky without compensation. Are you really offering a fair opt-out if you don’t lose your scholarship but everyone knows the guys who stick around are going to gain an edge in the eyes of the coaches?

BiSB: Shockingly, Schiano and Ferentz aren't on that list.

Seth: If college football history has taught us anything it's that these guys are wizards at getting around tricky compensation problems.

BiSB: People who say "well, they can opt out" are the same people who refer to "voluntary workouts" unironically. Sure, you can opt out. But do you think all coaches are going to be cool with it?

Ace: Yeah, getting around tricky compensation problems has generally been done by railroading players.

Seth: Yes it has. That hasn't stopped us from enjoying the last 150 college football seasons. I really don't think compromising on that somehow is going to change the direction things are going in.

BiSB: Last question: what was your favorite part of Nebraska's time in the Big Ten, and why was it Scott Frost Day?

Ace:

BiSB: Had us right where they wanted us. Just ran out of time.

Ace: The tides were turning.