Something amazing and nearly unimaginable is happening.
Major college sports is doing the right thing. Not the popular thing. Not the best thing for its financial bottom line. But the right thing.
If reports are true the Big Ten and Pac-12, major Power 5 conferences, will not play college football in the fall of 2020.
Big Ten presidents voted 12-2 on Sunday to not play this year, with only Nebraska and Iowa dissenting. Reports are official announcements from both leagues are expected Tuesday.
The much smaller Ivy League and Centennial Conference previously had opted out of football season. The Mid-American Conference joined them to become the first FBS-level league to do so. But the Big Ten and Pac-12 opting out takes this to a whole new level.
This is the biggest news in sports since the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic turned everything upside down exactly five months ago.
It is a monumental development because it a powerful message that our government _ federal, state and local _ should hear and heed: That in the ongoing national struggle to balance health and economic concerns, there should be no real debate. Lives are more important than dollars.
The adults in the room, in this case Big Ten and Pac-12 presidents, commissioners and athletic directors, are saying as much, loudly, on behalf of their student-athletes. They are saying so even knowing acutely that football is the big dog on campus producing the revenue that sustains entire athletic programs.
This also is a seismic development for what it may portend, for the huge domino that may have just tipped.
Because, now, how can the Southeastern Conference, the Big 12 and the University of Miami's Atlantic Coast Conference go on with their seasons as planned?
How reckless will they seem, putting money ahead of safety, now that the Big Ten and Pac-12 have taken hold of sports' moral compass?
And how can the NFL, the King Sport pro game, not pay attention to what is happening on the college level and have a reckoning over what its own priorities should be?
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell already has seen some 70 of his players opt out of the coming season. He has seen the issues MLB is having as travel magnifies the COVID-19 threat (as the Miami Marlins taught us all). Goodell has heard Dr. Anthony Fauci's warnings about the risk of football in the fall. He has seen the president of his own NFL Players Association call football a "perfect storm for virus transmission."
Would Goodell continue to push for an apocalyptic season in empty or near-empty stadiums even as the U.S. virus death toll approaches 200,000 in the fall? And would the NFL dare go on even if the other major college conferences now succumb to the pressure and to common sense and join the Big Ten and Pac-12 in opting out?
The Big Ten and Pac-12 taking on a gargantuan financial hit to not play football this fall is a fresh reminder of the ongoing magnitude of this plague and the collective sacrifice required of us all to get past it _ a sacrifice that makes you being asked to wear a mask seem infinitesimal.
The hope of the Big Ten, Pac-12 and others opting out is that the coming football season would not be canceled, but rather delayed from fall to next spring.
It seems an optimistic notion _ that life will be close enough to back to normal by then _ but optimism is oxygen right now in miserable, gut-wrenching 2020.
We simply have to have it.
The same cannot be said of a football season this fall.
