You'll hear a lot in the coming days and weeks about "game-changer" rapid antigen COVID-19 tests as the reason the remaining four conferences in Division I's Football Bowl Series are returning to the field after initially, insistently postponing the fall season.
You'll hear about increased safety protocols and decreased community outbreaks.
Oregon President Michael Schill attributed it to something even "bigger" _ providing hope "during some pretty dark days."
I'll pause for a moment to let you (pick one or more) shake your head, roll your eyes, sigh, snort or cynically chuckle.
Now, onto the real reason the Big Ten, Pac-12, Mountain West and Mid-American Conference put a cleat in the ground, changed direction and decided to play fall football six weeks after saying they absolutely, positively, adamantly, defiantly, righteously would not:
FOMO.
I'll save you the trouble of the Google search or asking your teenage daughter. It's an acronym for "fear of missing out" and even has its own social media emoji, a yellow face sitting in bed with a downturned mouth and creased eyebrows.
A formal definition from urbandictionary.com: "An omnipresent anxiety brought on by our cognitive ability to recognize potential opportunities."
Used in a sentence: "The brothers had last-slice FOMO as they stared at what was left of pizza."
It applies to college football, as the Big Ten and Pac-12 turned on their TVs this month and saw the sport being played on major networks, sometimes even with spectators dotting stadiums. Their cognitive ability to recognize potential opportunities kicked in.
Particularly financial ones.
Or put another way: They realized there weren't many slices of pizza left.
Schill, the Oregon president, had the audacity to dispute this, writing in a letter to the university community announcing a seven-game season will start Nov. 6: "It's certainly not about money; all of the Pac-12 programs, including Oregon, will still face multi-million-dollar shortfalls under this resumption plan. No, it's about something bigger _ hope. ... I believe sport can help unite our community, be a boost in morale, and give us something to cheer for during some pretty dark days."
In some ways, maybe he's right. It is about hope ... of not drawing on a $1 billion loan the Pac-12 reportedly was arranging _ $83 million per school at 3.75% over 10 years _ to mop up the red ink from no football this year.
Or listen to what Oregon State Athletic Director Scott Barnes told ESPN in May: "Anywhere from 75 up to almost 85% of all revenues to our athletic department are derived directly or indirectly from football. Indirectly, I mean sponsorship dollars, multimedia rights, and then you've got your gate, your donations and whatnot. The impact of not playing a season of football is devastating. It would rock the foundation of intercollegiate athletics the way we know it."
It's easy to paint athletic directors and university presidents as greedy, money-grubbing execs with $100 haircuts willing to sacrifice innocent student-athletes at the altar of the almighty dollar. It also would be wrong.
ADs and presidents are essentially CFOs these days, whose primary responsibility is balancing budgets and courting donors. They're doing what any reasonable person would, trying to avoid the two single worst outcomes in their position: telling dozens of people with families and mortgages that they no longer have a job, or telling dozens of athletes whose personal identity is wrapped in their sport that they no longer have a team.
Their mistake, their miscalculation, was thinking they could survive by pushing the 2020 season into 2021. And so minutes apart on Aug. 11, the Big Ten and Pac-12 announced they wouldn't play fall football as the other three power conferences pressed forward.
Said it was just too dangerous. Talked about scary "long-term" health complications associated with COVID-19. Worried about myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle brought on by viruses and a host of other maladies that sports physicians have been successfully treating for decades.
The Mountain West and MAC also opted against playing in the fall, and the four conferences crafted plans for spring semester even as coaches and players, noting the infinitesimal death rate of COVID-19 among college students, campaigned to suit up now.
Six weeks later ... it's suddenly safe. (Never mind that assessing long-term health risks usually requires exhaustive, longitudinal studies that take years, sometimes decades.)
What really happened?
The Big Ten turned on its TV in September, saw college football and got FOMO. Saw the pizza box emptying. Got hungry.
College football generated an estimated $1.7 billion in television advertising revenue last year across the major networks. Include tickets, sponsorships, merchandise and donations, and football amounts to a $4 billion annual business for the 65 universities in the five power conferences, or an average of about $62 million each.
The two alpha dogs in terms of revenues and payouts are the SEC and Big Ten, and what happened in August amounted to an ideological split of tectonic proportions. The ACC and Big 12 aligned with the SEC for a fall schedule. The Pac-12 followed the Big Ten down what it considered the high road despite impending financial devastation.
The hope: The other three would fail to successfully launch a fall season, and they'd all end up in the spring along with the lucrative College Football Playoff.
Money vs. morality.
Like it does regularly on the field against the Big Ten, the SEC won off it, too.
Once the Big Ten, under pressure from parents and players and (yes) even the president, announced a fall return, the Pac-12 had little choice but to follow realizing the consequences of irrelevance from going it alone in 2021. Then the Mountain West did. Then the MAC, the final holdout, sheepishly announced a six-game conference schedule a week after its commissioner insisted "there are no plans to play a fall season."
The Mountain West's TV payouts are a fraction of what they are in power conferences, $3 million compared to as much as $55 million, and many games won't have fans, but at this point it's about loss mitigation. The Mountain West TV contract requires an inventory of 39 games per season across CBS and Fox networks; with an eight-game schedule, they're looking at 48 and hoping positive COVID-19 tests don't wipe out more than nine.
Playing in spring semester could invalidate TV contracts and put conferences at the mercy of the networks for a significantly smaller payday. And the less money you lose now, the fewer jobs you eliminate later, the fewer sports programs you cut.
It's not the kind of harsh truth you can say without fear of public shaming in states where the coronavirus goal posts keep moving _ from managing the virus by flattening the curve so the healthcare system isn't overburdened to eradicating it completely with metrics based on case numbers no matter how many are asymptomatic or false positives from overly sensitive tests.
So you talk about cheaper, faster antigen tests as a "game-changer" just as the SEC decides to no longer use them because of accuracy concerns. You talk about increased safety protocols. You downplay myocarditis just weeks after it was too spooky to proceed.
You talk about hope, too.
The new hope: The checks keep clearing at the bank.
