Five Reasons Why The Big 10 Is Playing Football

Today, the Big 10 will begin playing football (although they technically started last night). There are five reasons why the Big 10 is beginning and feels justified in doing so:

1. Money

2. Money

3. Money

4. Money

5. Money

The Big 10 was the first of the big 5 conferences to come out and say that they weren't going to play football this fall. They were quickly followed by the Pac-12. Now they weren't the first conference to say they weren't playing. Many of the smaller conferences, I think led by the Ivy League, had already said they wouldn't play. 

But the smaller conferences were honest that it was both the health risk but also the economic impacts. They simply couldn't afford to pay for the testing that would be necessary to do it. Costco is now selling Covid-19 tests at $139, and so if that is a good going rate imagine testing several hundred people several times a week and you can see that would get really expensive really quick and most schools couldn't afford that.

But, the Big 10 didn't make that argument. Instead they said that they were concerned about the safety of their players and employees. They didn't see anyway to keep players safe and isolated so that there wouldn't be outbreaks. And, as it turns out, they were exactly right as we have seen with outbreaks among teams that were playing with games being cancelled or postponed every single week.

But, in seeing the other leagues start, and seeing that they were going to be making all the money that comes from college football, especially for the playoffs, and that the Big 10 would be excluded, they gave in and repented of their ways and set a schedule.

And so they start playing this weekend even as Covid-19 counts spike in nearly all of the states in which they play. They are recording rates we haven't seen since the summer, when it wasn't safe to play football, or in some cases setting new records. And yet they are going to play today.

The Big 10, and the Pac-12 following, cannot make any claims of moral superiority anymore. In fact, their claims of player safety are even worse than those of the ACC, SEC and Big 12 who at least said it was always about the money and decided to play anyways.

So congratulations Big 10 you will get your pay day, but at what and whose expense?

Preach the Good News

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 4:14-21:

In a speech I saw by Bishop Will Willimon, he recalled the first time he went to visit a prisoner on death row.  He said he was a little nervous going in knowing that the person he was going to be meeting with had committed some atrocious crime.  After arriving at the prison he was searched and then given a long set of instructions about what he could and could not do and could and could not say, and when he entered the room he had no idea what was going to happen.  After the prisoner he was meeting with sat down, Bishop Willimon asked him what he wanted to talk about; he said “Do you think the United Methodist Church is doing enough to reach out to a new generation offering them Christ?”  That was not really the question he expected to start the conversation out with.  As they continued to talk, Bishop Willimon found out that the man had become a Christian while on death row.  When asked how he came to Christ, the man said “well I heard a lot about Jesus and he thought he and I had a lot in common.”  To which Bishop Willimon said, “are you Jewish too?”  “No,” the man said, “Jesus was on death row and was executed by the state, and I’m on death row waiting to be executed by the state, so I think we’ve faced the similar things.”

That comment came back to me this week as I was thinking about he radical claim that Jesus is making in this passage and what it actually means for us, and what it means for others as well.  We often sentimentalize Christianity, and it’s message, removing some of the teeth and the call, removing the fact that we worship a man who was arrested, tried and executed, not because he was a nice guy, the state tends not to kill nice guys, but because his message, his good news, was seen as a threat not just to the religious leaders of his day, but more importantly because he was seen as a threat to the Roman empire itself.  There are significant costs to being a prophet.  Tavist Smilley said, “You can have people like what you say, or you can offer a prophetic message, but you cannot do both.”

Abhorrent Behavior, Part 2

So yesterday I wrote about adults in athletic situations not stepping up and doing their duty, and now we have the most recent example of abhorrent behavior in this regard. On Saturday, Virginia Tech player Greg Nosal got the tip of his finger caught in the face mask of the opposing quarterback and ripped the tip of his finger off. He didn't know it at the time and even though it hurt he played a few more plays until he looked down at his glove which was covered in blood, so he ran off the field to seek medical attention.

When they took his glove off, Nosal said he could see the tip of the bone, and so they sent people back onto the field to look for the tip of his finger, which they couldn't find. Then they looked in the glove and found that it was still in the glove. The team surgeon examined the wound and decided that the tip could be reattached, and then gave Nosal the choice: Stop playing now and have it reattached, or take some pain killers, have the finger put on ice and keep playing. Nosal chose the second option, and so he played into the fourth quarter in a game that they were leading 31-7 and eventually won 45-21.

The coach, Frank Beamer, said "For him to continue to play, it says a lot about him and what his effort for this football team is." In an interview with ESPN the team trainer, Mike Goforth, said that he's seen a lot of crazy things in football, but that he didn't consider this all that crazy it just proved how tough Nosal is, and then said "it's not like he lost a bone, it was just the skin at the top that got taken off."

This is disgusting on so many levels that it is just boggling to my mind. First, what type of doctor considers it okay to just drug up a player in order to allow them to play rather than surgically repairing his finger which has been torn off? He gave the player the option? Are you kidding me? What medical school can possibly teach this as appropriate medical behavior?

Second, the coach says that this proves his toughness and how much he cares about the team. Hey coach, aren't you supposed to care about the well being of your players? I understand that winning is important, but number one, you were already blowing the other team out, and number two, in the end it's only a football game. The long-term well being of your players should come first and foremost on your mind. It doesn't matter that he could still play. People have played with broken bones, but that doesn't make it right. You are the adult in the situation you need to stand up and say no, go get medical attention.

I have written a lot about concussions and football players, teams, doctors, coaches and the media not taking this seriously enough. There is a trend moving that in the opposite direction. One team recently hid the helmet of a player who had a concussion and wanted to go back in, but couldn't because he couldn't find his helmet.

That is a team that understands the seriousness of this issue. Because here is the problem. Most people say the biggest issue that needs to be overcome in order to be serious about concussions is the tough guy attitude that pervades athletics in general, and football in particular, that you suck it up and keep playing no matter what, and that is what leads people to keep playing with traumatic brain injuries which the shouldn't be playing with.

How is any player or team going to take concussions seriously and not want to keep playing in order to show how tough they are and show, in Beamer's words, how important the team is to them. If they are not going to stop playing when they are bleeding profusely because they are missing the tip of their finger, why would they ever stop for any injury which they can't even see, like an injury to the brain?

We need to be well past this macho man mentality and coaches, trainers and doctors need to be disciplined for allowing this to happen, let alone encouraging this type of behavior. This is simply unconscionable. What's even worse was the fawning displayed on ESPN and in the sports columns about this. I have yet to see a single person say that this was wrong, let along make the obvious connection to the problems in protecting players who have concussions who want to keep playing to show how tough they are and how important the team is to them.

It's time for the adults to act like adults. These players are given into your charge and it is your duty to protect them. Sometimes that means protecting them from themselves. I played enough sports to know about playing through pain, and breaking through walls, but this is way past that.

This is where it become asinine, and someone needs to start holding these people accountable. These are not gladiators out to entertain who can be disposed of at our leisure. These are kids who have their entire lives left in front of them, the vast majority of whom will never even sniff a professional team.

We need to be setting the examples for them, teaching them what is acceptable and what is not, and this is an absolute failure. The Virginia Tech coaching and medical staff should be ashamed of themselves, as should the media for not only not holding them accountable but for not even calling them to task.