Discussing SEC football phone call, Pac-12 football letter: A Blitz Podcast

We take a break from our conference previews to discuss the SEC football’s player leadership phone call and the Pac-12 #weareunited letter.

A news packed week in college football highlighted by a coalition of Pac-12 football players releasing a letter filled with demands for the 2020 season and beyond, has caused us to put our conference-by-conference previews of the forthcoming (we hope!) season on a one-week hiatus.

So if you were checking in this week expecting our 2020 ACC football preview — now including Notre Dame — then we apologize and hope that you will check back in next week. This week’s news just felt too important to gloss over while going full force on a season preview. We’ll pick those back up next week with the ACC and then the SEC after that.

Before the release of the aforementioned Pac-12 letter, the SEC grabbed the attention of the news cycle thanks to a leaked phone call the Washington Post obtained between conference officials, including commissioner Greg Sankey, and a few players from the conference.

In the call, several players directed questions to the leadership of the league that there just weren’t good enough answers to. Players are rightfully concerned with their own safety as preparations continue to have them play a game for free in the midst of a deadly global pandemic.

We tackle the ins and outs of that phone call during our second segment on this week’s Saturday Blitz podcast.

In our third and final segment of the week, we take a line-by-line look at the list of demands in the Pac-12 #weareunited letter posted by The Players Tribune. The Pac-12 players voiced their concern over playing during a pandemic, and took it one step further by itemizing a list of demands that they want fulfilled or they are prepared to sit out the entire season.

Some of the demands are, understandably, COVID-centric in nature. The others address the fallacy of amateurism and shoots to get players in all sports compensated beyond just their scholarships. We break down each item on the letter. We, um, have some thoughts.

Thanks for indulging our brief interlude away from the conference previews. We’ll get back to telling you why your favorite team is going to be bad next week.

The Saturday Blitz Podcast is part of the FanSided Radio Network at Spreaker. The show goes live every Wednesday morning. You can reach John Mitchell at @jlmitchell93 and Zach Bigalke at @zbigalke on Twitter.