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?