I’m a big fan of Coen brothers.
The great Lebowski? Great movie. Funny, absurd and a great rendition of those old detective noir movies with Byzantine plots that went nowhere. Fargo? One of the best films ever made, an escalating vortex of chaos and bad decisions, with a warm, strong protagonist standing in the middle and holding everything together. No Country For Old Men is a cool look at people confronted with a completely unsentimental and unfeeling universe that mocks logic as reason.
Miller’s Crossing, True Grit, Barton Fink, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art You You ?, Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man, Inside Llewyn Davis … heck, all you have to do is throwing in a handful of stinkers for herb and you have one of the best directing resumes ever.
What almost all Coen brothers’ films have in common is the idea that people are trustworthy and very terrible at planning. And really every aspect of it: bad at thinking plans through, bad at communicating plans to other people, bad at implementing plans, bad at executing what should happen next in the unlikely event that the plan falls on one somehow works.
It’s all entertaining enough to watch exaggerated buffoons being kicked in the ass by hubris in movie form. But the advantage of watching these movies at home or in the theater is that once the lights are on and back to your car, you can easily rest with the knowledge that we are not like dumb ol ‘here in the real world. Jerry Lundegaard, floating his way through an increasingly bent ransom scheme. We have a pretty good pearl about things.
Or at least that’s what we’re telling ourselves.
There are many reasons why Ohio State will not be playing football this fall (like other sports). I’m not exactly sure where the mythical line that divides “sports” and “politics” should be more, but for my purposes in this article it suffices to say that we are where we are in college football , because a lot of people were shocked up pretty bad. That is a generous, irresponsible way of talking about the deaths of 170,000 people, but field courage and irresponsibility also play a large part in that.
However:
“One thing we need to realize is that this is not a mistake that we will have in the fall sport,” Warren said. “We may not have any sports in the fall. We may not have college football season in the Big Ten.”
Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren made that offer on July 9, as he announced that the Big Ten was heading toward a conference-only schedule in the fall. It was at once incredibly precise and also in retrospect extremely annoying; if Kevin Warren knew in early July that there was a possibility that the pandemic situation was a threat for the football college season, why was apparently nothing done in the meantime to plan one or all of the possibilities as prepared?
Last night, the Big Ten began hypothetically discussing what teams would do in the fall * if * the season moved to the spring. It was controversial because the bigger programs still want to play this fall. It marked one of the first hypothetical conversations on this subject.
– Pete Thamel (@PeteThamel) 11 August 2020
When the amended Big Ten scheme was released on August 5, one could be forgiven for assuming that meant the changed list would serve as a template for all future changes. Complete cancellation would of course still be on the table, but I do not think anyone thought of what was released as one kind of immutable document that would not be adapted as the situation thickened. A season of ten becoming six and then zero is a frustrating outcome, but at least it follows a logical path.
The NCAA’s lack of leadership and planning is also strangely frustrating. An adopted governing body is now considering a bubble concept for college basketball, but Mark Emmert and company have provided little to no guidance on what to do about football or other fall sports.
Already listening to the backlog at campus level to the way in which Emmert announced championships for bankruptcy were canceled. Basically, athletes found out on social media like the rest of us
– Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) August 13, 2020
It is also not limited to college. As David Briggs writes about Gov. Mike DeWine’s action on high school sports in the Toledo Blade:
Ohio needs a leader here.
That’s you, Governor. Both clearly explain why it is safe to play football, especially in light of the Big Ten – who plans to test his athletes twice a week – conclude that it was not, and provide clarity about a plan for the season. Or stop stringing the athletes and coaches along.
I am not blind to the hardships these leaders are having. Literally every plan or decision will be criticized by one group as another, and nothing anyone comes up with will satisfy everyone. Worse, plans have to change because of, say, emerging medical evidence as well as logistical problems risking people doing even more. For political actors like Warren, Emmert and DeWine, there is nothing more frightening than losing the trust of the people you represent.
The problem is ultimately not limited to these leaders and their lack of caution and planning. Their failures shine brighter because of who they are, but their actions are not the cause of the longest offseason in history, it’s just a symptom of it.
For months, almost everyone involved in college sports has deliberately engaged in the worst kind of magical thinking: that we will get what we want, as long as we want it badly enough.
But a virus does nothing about football. A pandemic does not issue Heisman trophies.
What it does is hurt the most vulnerable among us and destroy plans for the future. It is possible to have both football and an uncontrolled virus, but that requires us to disappear into increasingly absurd knots to justify or ignore anything that comes with it, believing that our choices can exist in a vacuum during a pandemic.
I do not think most people think so, and I truly believe that the Kevin Warrens and Mike DeWines of the world have really good intentions when it comes to protecting the health and safety of the people they represent. . I just envy her jobs. But part of that job is understanding how to prepare and plan for each and every situation that arises, and then make a compelling argument that people will get on board with the necessary steps to take those plans into action. to bring.
Nobody seems to like it. Instead, we have seen COVID destroy with our lives (and with other sports), while at the same time expecting college football to be immune in some way.
That fiction is crushed.
The good news is that there is still an opportunity for leadership. Jeff Purdue’s Jeff Brohm took it upon himself to create a very detailed plan for how spring football could work. Ryan Day has been very focused on what he thinks should happen, beginning in January (for the record, winter football would actually kick a lot of ass).
Who knows if these plans will come to fruition, but it does not matter; what is important is to set a goal and then take the necessary steps to achieve it, and make things better along the way. That did not happen for Big Ten college football in the fall of 2020. Let’s make sure that when we are ready for football, it is sooner rather than later.
