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Published Sep 18, 2020
Food For Thought, presented by The Iron Horse Grill: Thanks, Mr. President?
Neal McCready  •  RebelGrove
Publisher

One of Donald Trump’s favorite things to do as President has been visiting college football games in friendly locations, bathing his eternally needy ego in applause and affirmation.

Last season alone, he attended the LSU-Alabama game in November, the Army-Navy game in December and the College Football Playoff championship between LSU and Clemson in January.

The First Football Fan (oooh, play on words) was nearly as ubiquitous (hello, Mizzou journalism school) within the sport as Kirk Herbstreit.

That’s going to be a difficult vanity play to repeat in 2020 — or is it?

There will be no college football crowds of the usual side. Heck, in July, a certain national columnist opined that there might be no college football, period. Pessimism percolated back then, and “we” were “speeding in the wrong direction as a nation in terms of combating the coronavirus pandemic," he wrote.

Had the season died, the columnist concluded, “we know who had the biggest hand in killing any chance of it happening: Donald Trump.”

I didn’t go to Missouri, but I have some thoughts about logical and illogical conclusions. If the season being canceled could be blamed on Trump, do we now have to give the credit to the season happening to the same guy?

Of course not, but that’s been the environment in my field for the past six months. Blaming the loss of a college football season on Trump was ridiculous and partisan. Crediting him with its return is just as silly.

No field has been hurt more in the last six months than journalism. As a collective, we simply failed. Sports journalism, with some notable exceptions, failed at an alarming rate. I don't know if it was fear, politics or some combination thereof, but we’ve lost all credibility and we deserve whatever criticism you have for us.

Journalists such as Mr. Forde seemed to cheer against the return of college football, and I’ll never understand why. Again, maybe it was fear. It's apparent he doesn't care for Trump, so maybe his politics interfered with his work. I also think there was a desire to be relevant. I get it. I cover college sports. At the end of the day, what I cover doesn't really matter that much. It's entertainment. It's big business, but it's not medicine or science or global economics. It's just sports.

Sometimes, I suppose, those of us that cover games for a living want to cover something more important. Coaching searches are fun, but when they're over, we go back to talking about where 17-year-old kids are going to go to college.

Forde wrote that “virus spread had been sufficiently contained in some other countries to allow sports to be played, thus far without disastrous fallout. The U.S. has lost all containment, yet still is hoping to play games. Professional leagues are one thing—well-paid adults represented by unions are making their own choices. College athletics, which many in America consider a raw deal for the star athletes in revenue-producing sports, are something else entirely. Even if everything were going smoothly, the college football optics would not be great. Things are not going smoothly in Donald Trump’s America.”

I doubt he'd admit it, but I suspect he'd like to have that back. For here we are, in mid- to late-September, and college football is being played in front of socially distanced crowds and less socially distanced luxury suites. In July, Forde said the pandemic wasn’t just about caseloads, “which many Trump acolytes like to dismiss as immaterial. The positivity rate is climbing, and so is the death rate. The average death toll from July 8-15 was 726, highest it had been in a month after bottoming out at 471 earlier in July. Bad trend. Very bad trend.”

Of course, many more rational people tried to tell the Fordes of the world that the virus was going to do what the virus was going to do. It was going to play out over the summer and into the fall and diminish as the nation reached herd immunity thresholds. Next Saturday morning, Florida and Ole Miss will kickoff in Oxford and Kentucky and Auburn will kickoff at Jordan-Hare Stadium. Five other Southeastern Conference games will follow later in the day. The ACC is playing. So is the Big 12 and the AAC. The Sun Belt is playing, as Conference USA. The Big Ten will begin next month after an embarrassing political play gone bad.

The Pac-12 might begin at Halloween or later, the college football equivalent of the walk of shame that happens on college campuses all over the country year after year for perpetuity. The MAC is looking for a path to return, as is the Mountain West.

Nothing changed in the past six weeks. There was no magical vaccine. Oh sure, there have been some advancements in testing, but the virus is doing what common-sense epidemiologists said it would do.

Forde opined that “perhaps football in the fall was always an impossible dream, but it seemed much more real in late May and early June, with America sacrificing and caseloads dropping. Then the shallow reservoir of Trumpian forbearance ran out, and people went back to doing whatever they wanted to do, gorging on ‘freedom.’

“And now we’ll see whether some semblance of college football can still be played. If not, send the receipts for a lost season to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

I can’t find the receipts. So I suppose, as non-sensical as it seems to be, I’ll write a thank you card if everything holds on for the next eight days. My business is enjoying college football. I would think Forde’s is, as well. Both of us, I'm guessing, would have felt financial pain had there been no season.

So, thank you, Mr. President? Pat and I appreciate all you’ve done to bring back the sport that helps feed our families.

It couldn’t be more ridiculous, of course, but after six months of insanity, it seems appropriate today, as we approach to the SEC’s return, to pen a commentary on the political bent of journalism. College football is back, as weird as it may be, and we should be able to just celebrate that. However, I don’t want to forget the forces that tried to prevent this Saturday and next Saturday from happening and I hope you don’t forget what motivated those forces.

It wasn’t just fear.

Nope, it was politics and there was absolutely an agenda. There's no denying that now.

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