Through Thanksgiving weekend, the people who put on the Sun Bowl annually on New Year's Eve were hopeful they could have a game this year.
It would be different, sure. The teams would come into El Paso for only a night or two, and the players basically wouldn't leave their hotels, creating a bubble atmosphere. There would be no festive team dinner at the Cattleman's Steakhouse, or an educational trip to Ft. Bliss military base, or the usual fun at Topgolf. The point would be to stage a football game in front of few fans and only for the national television audience on CBS, and the Pac-12 and Atlantic Coast conferences told Sun Bowl executive director Bernie Olivas they were fine with that arrangement.
Everything was pushing ahead toward two lucky athletic departments splitting the $4.7-million pot for participating in the game — until Olivas and the bowl's board opened their eyes and began to look around. El Paso is one of many COVID-19 hotspots nationwide, with 37,000 active cases and a death count nearing 1,000.
Last Monday, the Sun Bowl decided it was tapping out of the game.
"We're using our convention center as part hospital and bringing in mobile morgues ... we want to have a football game in the middle of this? We can do a lot better for our community," Olivas said. "The last thing we want is for someone to come here and somehow pick up the virus at our football game, go home and spread it, and it's traced back to the Sun Bowl game. It would be hard for us to live with that."
Added John Folmer, the bowl's football committee chairman who has been working with the game for 50 years, "The possibility of exposing just one fan or student-athlete to this disease, that's why we made this decision."
Sadly, in the scope of the 2020 college football season, it felt like an isolated occurrence.
Finally, somebody just said no on their own, without having their hand forced by state or local regulations. Finally, somebody wasn't saying they were operating "out of an abundance of caution" while simultaneously searching desperately for the next chance to get unpaid athletes onto television screens wearing school colors that blend to create a false sense of normality for viewers.
Folmer looked to be in pain that his beloved bowl game had to be canceled but felt "we're doing what's right at the end of the day." Meanwhile, by week's end, the Pac-12 announced it had found a new bowl partner for this year in the Lockheed Martin Armed Forces Bowl in Fort Worth.
It's amazing now looking back at the news conference in late September when the Pac-12 announced it was restarting a fall season. Oregon President Michael Schill, the chair of the league's CEO Group, said that if it became clear that it if wasn't working they would pull the plug.
Through four weeks, nine originally scheduled games were canceled — 38% — and three replacement games created on the fly. Arizona State had not played since Week 1 because of a major outbreak within its program until Saturday.
Stanford, due to Santa Clara County's latest COVID-19 rules, can't play football anymore on the Farm, so the Cardinal relocated to the Pacific Northwest for the last two weeks of the season to get in games at Washington and Oregon State.
If USC and Washington State play Sunday it will be the first weekend the Pac-12 was able to stage six games.
Combine all of that hassle with the pandemic situation worsening, and it's obvious there was nothing that was going to stop this money train once it got rolling.
Sunday would normally be the day the College Football Playoff announced its four-team field and set the other New Year's Six bowl matchups, allowing for the rest of the bowls to send their invitations. Instead we've got two more weeks of December drudgery, with the playoff selection committee insisting on ignoring travel advisories at the height of this pandemic's third wave to meet in person because they feel they can't have proper debate about how to seed Alabama, Notre Dame, Clemson and Ohio State over Zoom.
What exactly are we doing here? What is it, really, that we are watching? The most brazen example yet that this system is broken for the "student-athletes" it is meant to serve.
