Good Mornin’! Good Mornin’!
It’s blocking and tackling. It’s fundamentals. It’s sweat and repetition. It’s running wind sprints till you puke and hitting the blocking sled and chopping your feet. It’s also a whole lot more.
It’s football.
The greatest game in the world with a ball that bounces oddly.
That odd bounce this year is the COVID Bounce. Teams have assembled and distanced and masked with some players testing positive.
Schedules are up in the air. So are season tickets, heck all tickets, I reckon. If stadiums do open up, where does one sit? Revenues will plummet I’m sure and how does that season ticket money work out for those who aren’t the chosen ones to get in?
There’s far too many questions for a simple game.
No matter what decision is made about playing, it reminds me of a Bear Bryant quote about passing the football. There are three outcomes and two of them aren’t good. They can cancel season and socially distance and have online classes. Or teams can alter their schedules and move to the spring and players, coaches and even fans might get sick.
Or they can play this fall.
The decisions are still up in the air for major conferences but the SWAC has already decided.
They’ll fabricate a USFL season and play in the spring. Heck, spring football is where you figure out next year’s starters. Where coaches have time to configure and reconfigure and configure again. Not start a season. But the SWAC’s plans for football include a seven-game conference schedule that begins with an eight-week training period in January 2021. SWAC commissioner Charles McClelland noted games would begin near the end of February or the beginning of March. Each school will play six conference games (four divisional/two non-divisional) with the option to play one nonconference game.
I hope it works. Heck, maybe this will become a thing and half the college teams will play in the fall and the other half play in the spring. Maybe we could get them into thirds and have a third of them play through the summer. Then we’d have real football all year long.
Now that’s an idea. Heck, the northern schools never get to play their “spring” sports schedules anyway due to wet and cold and snow. Move their baseball and track to the fall when they still have a chance at decent weather. Those folks rarely make it to Omaha anyway, so what’s the problem?
That would be fine for football though. Let’s watch the southern teams play real big boy football in the fall and let the little big 10 with 14 teams play in the spring with other yankee teams. TV revenue would be awesome with year-round football.
Heck, call the spring football the NIT or the COVID League Championship to keep it separate from the NCAA. Or maybe it’s time to do away with the NCAA and just let conferences run their own league and figure out how to crown a national champion. Give the boys and girls a little laundry and pizza money with their scholarships and call it a day. But please, let’s play some football this fall – high school, college and pro.
There’s got to be a way to do it and make it work.
Another Bear quote might work here, “You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him to a heavy load.” Let’s hook up fall football and see how it pulls the heavy load.
Hotty Toddy, Everybody!
