1. This should have been one of the easiest, most informative 10 Weekend Thoughts on the calendar. Saturday would have been the Grove Bowl game, meaning there would have been a lot of spring wrap-up commentary in this space today.
Speaking of today, Vanderbilt and Ole Miss would’ve been trying to beat the rain and wrap up their three-game series at Swayze Field this afternoon. The Southeastern Conference season would have been at the halfway point following this weekend. My plan was to evaluate where Ole Miss was or wasn’t and go from there from a coverage standpoint. Maybe I was going to start doubling down on baseball coverage. Maybe there would be no need. The plan was to make that determination after this weekend.
By now, we all know about plans.
There was no spring football. The baseball season was canceled five weeks ago. Oxford would’ve been bustling over the weekend. Instead, it was a veritable ghost town. I keep telling my children they’ll one day be telling my great grandchildren about 2020, about how coronavirus essentially shut down not just a country but also a planet.
My house showed the first signs of cracks in the proverbial armor this week. Two of three broke down at different times, a result of the strain of such a dramatic series of changes in their lives. Kids miss their friends. They miss their sports and activities. They miss their routines. Online school — and I mean this with no sense of malice to the teachers out there — is a joke. Most of the work is busy work, and it just stresses the kids out. The instruction — again, through no fault of the teachers — isn’t close to the level kids are used to.
Grades matter in our house, but on Friday night, as our tired and frustrated son, Carson, stayed up to finish an assignment due at midnight, I told him to just do his best, turn it in and forget it. He’s in the seventh grade; no one is ever going to hold this against him. I told him I didn't care about his grades for the rest of this school year. I'm far more concerned with his mental health. That might be bad parenting, but as this month has unfolded, it's genuinely how I feel.
These are unprecedented times. The goal, at least in my opinion, isn’t to get through them looking better or being more organized or with some wonderful set of new habits. Nope, the goal is just to survive -- one day at a time, as ugly as it might look in the process.
2. If you’ve listened to the Oxford Exxon Podcast in the past, you know I’ve had encounters with an old ghost woman who straddles my chest and holds me down. I’ve been told it’s a common dream scenario, but on Saturday night, I dreamt I was laying at the beach, minding my own damn business when an old woman came up to me and started messing with my toes. I have really sensitive feet, so I pulled them away. That angered her, so she sat on my chest and started hitting me. I woke up screaming that I was going to punch her.
Night after night, I have the craziest dreams. I wake up hot, screaming. I drink water, lay therein the dark and do math in my head. I try not to stress, to remember to not try to control the uncontrollable. I worry about the future. I worry about our kids.
This has to end soon. I’m losing my mind.
3. Along those lines, and I mean this as sensitively and respectfully as I can, is it possible we overreacted to COVID-19? Don’t get me wrong; as a nation, we had no choice but to prepare for the worst case scenario. We had to do whatever was necessary to prevent our hospitals from being overrun. We had to flatten the curve. If the models missed, so be it. If the models were right and we as a nation did nothing, the results would be catastrophic.
It appears we have indeed flattened the curve. In New York, the American epicenter of the pandemic, hospitalizations declined to 16,000 from a high of 18,000, and the number of patients being kept alive by ventilators also fell. There were 507 new deaths Saturday, down from a high of more than 700 a day.
"If the data holds and if this trend holds, we are past the high point and all indications at this point are that we are on a descent. Whether or not the descent continues depends on what we do," New York governor Andrew Cuomo said at a daily briefing.
The debate in our country is now when should we “re-open?” My answer: Soon — with some caveats.
it's just one non-economist/non-epidemiologist's opinion, but I think we need to re-open carefully and slowly. We need to be kind to one another by wearing masks when we’re out in public. I don’t know that government can mandate that action, but it can plead to the general goodness of the populace. We can urge the elderly and those with morbidities to stay home for a bit longer.
The federal government should move heaven and earth to make testing much, much more prevalent. There’s a lot of work to be done.
However, the argument holds. The point was to flatten the curve before we resumed something similar to life as we knew it. It wasn’t to eliminate the virus before we could reopen the marketplace. The goal line keeps getting moved.
If you tell a marathon runner the race is 26.2 miles long, he or she knows what to expect. If you lengthen the race to 27 miles or even 30 miles, he or she might press on a little further and go to the finish line.
However, if the race just goes on indefinitely, the runners are going to run out of patience.
4. A vaccine, realistically, is at least 18 months away. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted in a New York Times story Sunday that the record for developing a vaccine is four years, for the mumps vaccine.
As the Times story pointed out, “A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.
“It is possible to speed up that process with ‘challenge trials.’ Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then ‘challenge’ them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.
“Challenge trials are used only when a disease is completely curable, such as malaria or typhoid fever. Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.”
Without a vaccine, and assuming no breakthrough treatment or readily reliable antibody tests, we are going to be left, as a society, to weigh risk versus reward. There will be pain either way. There will be lost lives either way.
How contagious is the virus? What is the real attack rate? How many of us have already been exposed to it? Can we afford to wait until we have all those answers to return to our lives?
Those are questions we all, collectively and individually, have to answer in the coming weeks and months.
5. You come here to read about sports, of course, and that’s something I’m cognizant of even when there are no sports to write about.
I spent much of last week talking to people about the return of sports. When will they return? Will fans be allowed?
At the professional level, games without fans are almost a certainty, even if the debate about how that could happen continues to rage.
At the college level, that question is far more problematic. Longtime Tuscaloosa News columnist/reporter Cecil Hurt took on this topic over the weekend.
Here’s an excerpt:
So one question, among many, is this: does college football without fans, other than those sitting at home and watching television, qualify as football?
The first group to make that call will be the broadcast rights holders for those events. If the Southeastern Conference, to use one example, starts playing on the first Saturday in October and delivers 13 weeks of content, plus a postseason, has it fulfilled its side of the bargain. Would that be enough to collect the television revenue that funds a large portion of all athletic activities at almost all Power Five colleges?
Lawyers will have to settle that, through some sort of negotiation. That could satisfy the terms of the various television agreements. That doesn’t mean it would make everything whole. If one uses what seems to a fairly conservative economic impact estimate, seven silent home games would probably mean a loss of around $140 million to $150 million a game, particularly to its restaurants, bars and hotels. That’s not counting the absence of atmosphere, not a monetary loss but, in some ways, a spiritual one. (How could there be tailgating on the Quad, for instance?)
There are a hundred other questions. Here is one: what if the governors of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia have one timetable for allowing large public gatherings to resume, but the governors in Kentucky or hard-hit Louisiana have another? What happens in the ACC if Florida says ‘play ball’ and New York says ‘wait a minute.’ What if all 14 SEC presidents cannot agree to have large gatherings on campus if students have not returned?
I’ll take that on, and my opinion on this has drawn anger and derision, including from fellow reporters who I deeply respect. It’s my very educated opinion, first and foremost, that if students aren’t allowed to return to campuses this fall, there will be no sports on those campuses. Period. No way. Won’t happen.
However, what if college students are allowed to return? What then? I return back to the same thing I’ve thought all along, and many have told me I’m right.
I think it’s all or nothing this fall. If it’s safe for tens of thousands of students, teachers, administrators and workers to return to campuses, live in dorms, eat in cafeterias, congregate in groups and mill freely in those spaces, it’s safe for people to assemble in stadiums to watch games.
If it’s not safe for people to congregate in stadiums, it’s not safe for the student-athletes themselves to be on the fields of competition. The issue of liability, by itself, would prevent that from happening, in my opinion. If the games aren’t safe for fans and family and the student bodies the student-athletes represent, they aren’t safe for the unpaid student-athletes.
I’d bet on a 2020 season played in the spring of 2021 before I’d bet on a season played in empty stadiums this fall. I also believe the Power 5 schools (and Notre Dame) will act in unanimity. It’s my educated opinion the discussion of a league like the SEC acting on its own and playing a shortened season is utterly ridiculous.
6. I also believe there’s almost no chance college football returns first. If you’re desperately hoping for college football, soccer and other sports on campuses this fall, you need to be cheering hard for the NBA, MLB, NHL and/or MLS to return to the fields of play at some point this summer.
Major League Baseball has reportedly discussed having all 30 teams play a shortened season in Arizona. In that scenario, the teams would essentially be quarantined in Arizona for months, shuttling from hotels to stadiums and back with no fans in attendance.
Predictably, that plan has been met with resistance from players, so much so that it appears quite unlikely.
“I think you’re going to have a hard time telling grown men with established lives to stay in a hotel and not be with their families,” Chicago Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo told The Athletic. “You’re going to tell (Cubs third baseman) Kris Bryant that he’s not going to see his baby (born April 7) for 4 1/2 months?
What if, Rizzo was asked, the quarantine in Arizona was just six weeks and then the season resumed in the teams’ respective cities?
“Six weeks, I think that can work,” Rizzo said. “It’s just the logistics of it. Hotel workers and grounds crew and cameramen. … It can be pulled off. I think it could. But health and salaries, how do you work through all that? They can’t pay us full pay, right? Then playing into November, December, you’re jeopardizing getting ready for next season. I want to play. But we don’t want to jeopardize two years of baseball. That’s the hard part.”
The NBA is still toying with the idea of quarantining its teams in Las Vegas or Orlando for the playoffs. Of course, the NBA didn’t finish its regular season, so there are issues for both the players and the owners regarding pay and service time and next season’s salary caps that would have to be collectively bargained.
Earlier this week, the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association agreed to a plan to withhold 25 percent of each player's paycheck beginning May 15. The agreement clears the way for a gradual reduction in player salaries should the force majeure provision in the collective bargaining agreement be enacted with the cancellation of regular-season games.
Per ESPN, the NBA has no immediate plans to announce the cancellation of any regular-season games, and the union has informed players that it could be June 15 before the players know whether games are canceled and how many, sources said.
MLS president Don Garber told ESPN’s Taylor Twellman earlier this week that if the league resumes play this season, it would likely be in empty stadiums. Garber also floated playing games at neutral sites or in a tournament format in a shortened season.
MLS teams haven’t trained in more than a month. A moratorium through April 24 will be extended by at least two more weeks, Garber said.
The league issued this statement Tuesday:
“Major League Soccer continues to regularly evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, including how it will affect our plans for the 2020 season. Although we hoped to return to play in mid-May, that is extremely unlikely based on the guidance of federal and local public health authorities. Our goal remains to play as many games as possible, and while we currently have enough dates to play the entire season, we recognize at this time that it may become difficult to do so. We continue to learn more every day from the medical experts, and we expect to have additional details in the coming weeks regarding when we can return to play. As we have throughout this process, we will update our fans with every decision, and we thank them for their support and understanding during this extremely challenging time.”
In short, as of April 19, no one knows anything yet. The people who blindly tell you sports are coming back soon are just guessing. The doomsday scenario types who tell you there won’t be any college or pro sports for the rest of 2020 are guessing as well. No one knows yet.
7. Later tonight, ESPN’s highly anticipated documentary, “The Last Dance,” will finally air. I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to something this much.
After more than a month without sports and after weeks of binging Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, I’m so excited to see something “original” and “new.”
The story of how the documentary came to be is fascinating, in and of itself.
Carson was born in 2006. He didn’t live through Kobe Bryant’s prime. He has seen LeBron James dominate. He’s heard about Michael Jordan, of course, but understanding the greatness of someone who performed a decade before you were born is difficult.
He asked me recently if Jordan were better than James. I answered in the affirmative. He looked at me somewhat incredulously, and I don’t blame him. James, after all, is clearly the dominant player of his era, one that has included some of the game’s most talented players ever.
Tonight, he will get to see Jordan “come to life,” if you will. I’m excited for that. Based on Twitter, tons of sports fans are as well. The ratings will be through the roof.
8. Speaking of Jordan, I’ll take the Zach Berry Challenge here. Berry, who runs Red Cup Rebellion and covers recruiting for us here at RebelGrove.com, recently posed a question on The Grove.
“What if I told you,” Berry said. “I have a starting five of...
Michael Jordan
Kobe Bryant
LeBron James
Giannis Antetokounmpo
Shaquille O'Neal
Do you think you could put together a squad to legitimately compete?”
That’s an incredible team. It features two great shooting guard who were also elite defenders, a versatile player in James who would have to handle some point guard duties with that lineup, a dominant, rim-protecting center and a freakishly athletic forward who is highly skilled in the paint.
However, if I were tasked to assemble a team to try to beat Berry’s group, I think I’d have a shot. I’d go with Magic Johnson at the point, getting a size advantage over Jordan or Bryant and possibly forcing James to guard him, creating mismatches elsewhere.
At shooting guard, I considered several options, from Reggie Miller to James Harden to Clyde Drexler. However, I think I’m going to pair in-his-prime Dwayne Wade with Johnson in my backcourt.
At center, give me Hakeem Olajuwon. That’s a no-brainer. He’s better than Shaq. I’m going with Tim Duncan at power forward, and as much as I love Giannis, I think Duncan is going to neutralize him. At small forward, I thought about Kevin Durant and Julius Erving. I considered Charles Barkley, but give me Larry Bird.
So there’s my team, Zach.
G Magic Johnson
G Dwayne Wade
C Hakeem Olajuwon
F Larry Bird
F Tim Duncan
9. It’s time for another quarantine trip to the kitchen. Here’s our resident Parisian chef, Burton Webb, with Taste of the Place, Lesson 32: Apricot and Almond Bread Pudding.
So as I was growing up, I liked bread pudding. It wasn’t my favorite but it was easy to make. All you had to do was put milk, sugar, eggs and your chopped bread in a mixing bowl, let it marinate, then cook it. Then I learned a little secret — Creme Anglaise. This is one of the mother dessert sauces and when you combine all of the ingredients above but in a different way. You will make a bread pudding that you will love. So let’s get right into it.
Tidbit #1: You want to use day old bread because it absorbs more of the liquid when you marinate it. If you don’t have day old bread, slice your bread and then toast it in your oven before you marinate it.
Tidbit #2: When it comes to the size of your chopped bread, make sure that 3/4 of the chopped bread is bite size pieces. The other 1/4 bigger in size to give you a texture imbalance. Chef tip.
Tidbit #3: For your creme anglaise, you will need to heat the milk in a sauce pan first. Then in a side bowl, combine the sugar and egg yolks, mix. Pour half of the hot milk into the bowl and whisk. Then pour the contents of the bowl back into the sauce pot and cook until 185 degrees Fahrenheit. If you do cook it over this temperature, the eggs will coagulate. So be mindful.
Tidbit #4: You will need to cook the bread pudding in a water bath. All this means is that you will place your baking tin in a bigger baking tin with water. This is due to the custard that you made.
Things you will need:
4-6 People
1.5 Hours to Prepare
Make during the afternoon for your evening Dinner
Utensils Needed:
1 Work Surface with a Serrated Knife
1 Large Mixing Bowl
1 Large Sauce Pot
1 Metal Whisk
1 Wire Mesh Strainer
1 Rubber Spatula
Measuring Cups of 1 Cup, 1 Tbsp, and 1 Tsp.
1 13 x 9 Deep Baking Dish
Aluminum Foil
1 Bigger Deep Baking Tray
1 Stove Top and Oven
1 Digital Thermometer
1 Pair of Oven Mitts
Ingredients Needed:
1 Baguette
1 Jar of Apricot Jam
8 Tbsp of Sliced Almonds
1 Tbsp Vanilla Extract
4 Cups of Whole Milk
1 Cup of White Sugar + 1 Tbsp
8 Egg Yolks
1 Tsp Salt
Directions:
Step 1: “Mis en Place” all of your ingredients. Put your milk in your sauce pot and place on your stove eye. Heat till smoking.
Step 1.2: Put your egg yolks, sugar, and salt in the mixing bowl. Mix. Slice your bread and place to the side of your work surface.
Step 1.3: Pour half of your hot milk into the mixing bowl and whisk. Then return to the sauce pot and cook till 185 degrees. Remove from the heat.
Step 2: Place your chopped bread into that mixing bowl and strain the milk mixture into the bowl. Add your vanilla extract, apricot jam, and 4 Tbsp of the sliced almonds into the bowl. Let marinate for 10 minutes.
Step 3: Turn your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Put your bread mixture into your baking dish. Add the rest of your sliced almonds on top with the 1 Tbsp of white sugar. Cover the top with the aluminum foil.
Step 4 (Last Step): Put your baking tray in the bigger tray and place in your oven. Before closing the door, pour water into the tray. Cook for 35 minutes. Then open your oven door and remove the aluminum foil. Place your oven to the broil setting. Cook until the top is brown and the almonds are toasted. Remove and let sit to room temperature. Then enjoy! I hope all are well in the uncertain time and enjoy the time that you now have. From the Mississippian in Paris, Bon Appetite!
10. We’ll have something this week. I don’t know what. I really don’t. However, I’m determined to come up with something. That's what you pay for -- not for us to sit around and complain about the difficulty of our jobs.
My field has been devastated in the past few weeks. Friday was an especially horrible day. Really talented people have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. The least I can do is continue to try to provide quality content in a time no one could have ever really prepared for. Whether that is the written word, compelling podcast interviews or both, that’s my job and I’m going to try to do it each and every day.
Until then, here are some links of interest to me _ and hopefully, to you _ for your reading pleasure:
So what happens to all those game contracts if we adjust the season? - Extra Points with Matt Brown
The What I Would Do 2020 NFL Mock Draft - RealGM Analysis
Tough love: How Bradley Beal learned to speak his mind after getting an earful – The Athletic
'The Victory Machine' excerpt: Maximum NBA chaos
Why Walt Disney World would be the ideal spot for the NBA to salvage its season
College's Magical Allure Is Vanishing for Many NBA Prospects
Stark’s Strange But True Files: The home run that broke Baseball-Reference – The Athletic
As Clayton Kershaw waits for baseball to return, a look at his family, legacy and future
‘Bigger than two minutes on a Sunday’: Inside six reporters’ side gigs – The Athletic
He's an Ironman. His battle with COVID-19 nearly killed him - StarTribune.com
IT'S TIME TO BUILD - Andreessen Horowitz
Media coverage of allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh
