Mid-Major Majesty: Jan. 25, 2021
Spring football was a safer bet for the FCS. It won't be a safe one.
Surviving is not the same thing as thriving.
Many did not survive the fall, but college football did. The institution of college football did.
In one very basic sense, the fall season was not unlike the several that came before it: Alabama won a championship, emerging victorious out of the triumvirate that also includes Clemson and Ohio State. Oh, and Oklahoma won the Big XII and nobody much gave a damn for the PAC-12. Oh, and there was an undefeated Group of Five team or two that wound up losing a close game in Atlanta to a team that had to drive less than three hours to get to the stadium.
But we all know the end results like that, the things that wind up on the agate pages, are just a fraction of the story of a season. I’ve read Friday Night Lights a couple of times and I cannot tell you what Permian’s record was. It doesn’t matter. That’s not what makes a season.
This season was defined by chaos. The best game of the year was scheduled three days in advance. Some schools played nobody outside their conference. Others had to make up a schedule from whole cloth as they went along. Some star players decided not to participate at all. Others missed a big game or two, causing massive waves in their team’s season because of one positive COVID test.
The system survived. But it did not thrive.
The scariest part of COVID-19 is something that doesn’t often get discussed. The virus is scarcely a year old. None of us truly knows what the long-term effects of it are, for anyone. Concerns about increased risks of heart conditions and other illnesses can’t be brushed away too easily because nobody knows what your body is like five years after having this disease. It’s called a novel coronavirus because it’s new. We don’t know how it ends.
The decisions (because it was not singular) to play college football in the fall had similar consequences that cannot be truly known. How much of the fall spread, that massive wave that crested in November, December and January, was due to a perception of normal in communities that see the football season as a benchmark of normalcy? In the South and Midwest, college football is not just a game that’s played on college campuses, it’s a cultural icon, a common thread that binds people, brings them together for a dozen or so Saturdays. In a supremely abnormal year, when bringing people together isn’t the best thing for the health of all of us, was that a good thing to have?
But the virus isn’t the only health crisis we’re facing. People feel more isolated now than ever, and it’s important to have those signs of normal, even if things aren’t normal. It’s important to give people a chance to interact together, even if it has to be done differently. How many people kept their cool during this hell year because on Saturday they could watch two lines of teenagers run into each other?
All of this is to say, the question of whether college football was a good idea is a good one to ask, for history, for posterity, for the future. My opinion, which isn’t worth much, is that it probably wasn’t worth it, at least not worth doing it in the fall. It’s impossible to say that this massive wave of COVID, with thousands of deaths a day now, wasn’t exacerbated in part, at least, by the resumption of in-person sports. At the very least, we’ve learned a lot more in the past few months than we knew in August, and a February start to an FBS season could have led to a truncated, but perhaps more organized and logical, spring season.
Alas, we won’t have a spring season without the virus. It’s still here, now more than ever, and with new variations that are more contagious and more deadly. Sure, we have a vaccine, in the sense that it’s out there, but in terms of access for the bulk of people who participate actively in the college football universe, broad availability is likely still months away. So no, the schools that waited to play all their games until the spring, they won’t get a season without chaos. They will, however, have learned from the mistakes of their better-funded peers.
That’s the short term. In the long term, the past year will take the better part of the next decade to recover from. Schools will drop football altogether because of the costs. Not Alabama or Clemson or Notre Dame or Ohio State, but the ones you see on ESPNU at odd hours of the day might. Players, distraught by the chaos of the past year, or upset about how their coaches and administrators handled it, will quit a sport they wouldn’t otherwise have quit. Fans will lose faith in the game, either because of how they played through this crisis or how they played through without letting them in the gates. There will be repercussions. It’s too soon to know, now, what effect they will have.
McNeese State plays Tarleton State on Feb. 13.