College football fans are cringing as the possible loss of a season approaches, but that’s not what they should be concerned with.
If you’re a college football fan you’ve probably spent much of the past few weeks closely watching the news cycle, hoping for some nugget of good news to emerge about the 2020 season. So far, the schedule plans of each Power-5 conference are the closest thing to “good” news anyone has seen.
As for the rest of the news, it all seems to be pointing to one thing — thanks to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the chances of having a college football season in 2020 are becoming slimmer and slimmer with each passing day.
But that’s not what college football fans should really be concerned about, and here’s why.
The pandemic, awful as it’s been, will eventually be controlled, whether by immunizations, herd immunity, or just some random act of generosity from mother nature. Coronavirus may never be completely gone, but we will find a way to control it.
When that happens, sports — college football included — will at some point be able to return to a more normal state, maybe not all at once, but it will get there.
As for the 2020 season, the panic button pressed when the MAC canceled football for the season was a little overblown. The fact is, the Power-5 conferences don’t really care what the Group of Five conferences do. The Power-5 schools have a ton of money at stake, and if there’s a way to play football this year, they’ll make it happen.
Listen to “The SEC Phone Call and the Pac-12 #WeAreUnited Letter” on Spreaker.
What fans should be watching more closely is how the pandemic and its residual effects, along with the growing movements for social and racial justice, have cast a bright light on the NCAA and the Power-5 conferences, along with every sketchy rule and requirement they hold over student-athletes.
The players are organizing, and that scares the hell out of the suits.
It’s almost as if the NCAA and its power conferences are waving the pandemic around in one hand trying to distract fans from the real issues that are happening in the other hand.
“Look! Look! Look over here! We might have to cancel the season. Pay no attention to those players gathering together over there.”
The NCAA weathered a small version of this storm back in 2014, when Northwestern University football players attempted to unionize, a move which was eventually blocked by the National Labor Relations Board.
Dealing with a single university and a relatively small group of players led by one upstart quarterback was relatively easy for the NCAA, but trying to squash entire conferences full of players who are penning eloquent objections complete with long and short-term demands is a hurricane-force problem the NCAA is ill-equipped to handle.
If the players continue to unite, grow in numbers, and stand strong in their ideals, this could cause a paradigm shift in college football structure, and eventually in all of college sports.
College football is the tip of the spear.
A move away from amateurism and “free rides” would mean an end to college sports as we know it, and while the cause of this ongoing change is a little different than he thought, one man saw something like this coming years ago.
In a 2015 interview B. David Ridpath, Associate Professor of Sport Management at Ohio University and past President of The Drake Group, he surmised that the continued abuse of college athletes as a tool for financial gain would bring an end to the current college sports model.
“We can go one of two ways,” Ridpath told me. “We can either continue to run it as part of the educational enterprise and then manage it as an extracurricular activity — and we’d argue that people would still come and see the games — or, we just call it what it is and let it be a paraprofessional, outsourced operation of the university, with no eligibility connection.
“Meaning, if [players] decide to go to school, they’re doing it on their own time, they don’t have a minimum number of hours to take and we don’t have to spend millions of dollars every year to try and keep some of these kids in school.”
While Ridpath’s argument revolves around the eligibility requirements for student-athletes and how schools constantly skirt the rules, the result is the same. Student-athletes realize how they’re being played, and they unite with one voice to bring it to an end.
The steps leading to where we are now — the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit, the Northwestern attempt to unionize, players legally challenging the right to profit from their own image and likeness — have all been brought to a head and put under the microscope thanks to fear of COVID-19.
The virus has given players around the country a commonality, regardless of how hotly they were recruited, and caused them to unite. We’re seeing it first within conferences such as the Pac-12 and Big Ten, but it’s a solid bet that a national movement isn’t far off.
Every dogmatic rule and regulation in the mammoth opus that is NCAA rulebook was put in place to stop precisely what’s happening right now – players speaking out and taking a stand, even if it includes opting-out of the season or beyond.
The system wasn’t set up to handle hashtags like #WeAreUnited or #BigTenUnited, and now it’s being put to the test.
This is more than just about the argument of whether or not to pay players. The student-athletes who have signed their names to these petitions and demands are looking for more than just a paycheck. They want security for their health, their future, and their rights.
Can we blame them?
There’s simply no way of predicting what will or could happen if this movement by the players gains momentum, but it’s precisely what the NCAA and it’s member institutions don’t want fans paying attention to.