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COLUMN: If Illinois Athletics Wants Badly to Push Fall Sports, Just Please Admit Why

The University of Illinois barely acknowledges the pessimism of playing college football this fall during a pandemic without a vaccine. Why? Money.

Matthew Stevens

COLUMN: If Illinois Athletics Wants Badly to Push Fall Sports, Just Please Admit Why
COLUMN: If Illinois Athletics Wants Badly to Push Fall Sports, Just Please Admit Why /

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The public face and attitude of athletics at the University of Illinois is one of the Lesley Gore hit song: Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows everywhere.

University officials had an opportunity to acknowledge the pessimism of playing college football and other fall sports with amateur student-athletes during a world health pandemic without any acceptable vaccine against a virus that continues to see cases dramatically spike up in at least a third of the states in our country. Instead, U of I officials, specifically university chancellor Robert Jones and athletics director Josh Whitman, held what they called a “public presentation” but more accurately could be described as a partially tone deaf infomercial to talk today about protocols for when the 2020 season happens in the fall.

No, not if. No mention of if fall sports are played until the 50-minute mark by Jones. Practically no mention of it at all by Whitman.

“Our plan is to engage in all of our fall sports. Our plan is all of those sports will compete this fall. All of these decisions that have been made…are being made with an eye toward putting us in the best position to have sports,” Whitman said Thursday. “With the understanding that if circumstances dictate, we certainly won’t hesitate to pull the car over if you will.”

And let's assume that is true, why then Mr. Whitman is there this stubborn resistance to wait until spring to take that car out of the garage? Whitman’s boss may have actually properly answered that question in the “presentation” even if he didn’t mean to.

“By not having our athletics programs play out in the way that they traditionally do, is a way for them to assist us in carrying out that primary responsibility of keeping everyone at this university safe,” Jones said.

Everybody behind the scenes of today’s live announcement involving Jones and Whitman will happily tell you meetings are happening daily that involve dozens of different plans. However, Illinois athletics officials still want to present the public that college football in Champaign in 2020 is going to happen. And why, in the minds of every important person on the Champaign-Urbana campus, does this belief exist? What information do those at the University of Illinois know that the institutions in the Ivy League and Patriot League (who have already postponed all fall sports) don’t know or are ignoring? Money. That’s it. That’s the reason. The University of Illinois needs the athletics department to do what it does best. No, not win. The scoreboard at Memorial Stadium and State Farm Center is a convenient byproduct. No, Robert Jones’ scoreboard for athletics shows up in a balance sheet every fiscal year. What the athletics department does best for the U of I is make money. Harvard football isn’t nearly a significant revenue generator so they can make a decision based on overall public health and science instead of dollars and cents.

Money is the reason to push forward toward a plan for intercollegiate football that will undoubtedly see student-athletes test positive for a virus that scientists still can’t yet determine its long-term effects. Money is the reason we’re being told today’s U of I presentation makes sense. Not public health. Not safety. And no matter how early in today’s presentation or how often they try to spin this, not for “the welfare of our student-athletes”. No, this is about money. Cash. Pure cabbage. Green pieces of federally produced paper with dead presidents on them.

“There’s no doubt that the financial impact of COVID-19 is already being felt by our athletic programs,” Jones said. “And if there’s not going to be athletics in the fall, that financial impact will be even greater. But it is not the first time this university has had to manage a financial crisis so if that is the worst case scenario, I have absolute confidence in Josh Whitman, the coaches and the administrative staff that they will manage this situation to the best of their abilities.”

And please, don’t tag me with this cancel culture garbage label created to gaslight the politicism of a deadly virus when injecting politics in this was frankly unnecessary from the beginning. I’m a sportswriter who would love nothing more than live sports in a healthy way to be back in my life as soon as possible. Didn’t The Basketball Tournament and House Of Paign prove just that? This virus causing no spring sports and potentially little to no sports in the fall has forced a lot of my friends and colleagues to unemployment. I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone so please, don’t think I’m some evil mastermind wanting to watch the continuation of the sporting world burn. I’m not that guy.

However, instead of publicly addressing the concerns of Illinois football players Milo Eifler and Josh Imatorbhebhe or even releasing any COVID-19 positive case data, Illinois officials walked through a plan that suggests how 20 percent of fan capacity will be admitted into Memorial Stadium in just a few months. Sure, because while a full contact sporting event is going to go on under no social distancing guidelines on the field, Illinois wants to show graphics of how fans in Memorial Stadium stands could still happen with social distancing.

Please understand I’m not suggesting Jones, Whitman or any other power broker at the U of I pushing for football in the fall are monsters willing to sacrifice the health of student-athletes. They’re not evil people. Quite the opposite. What they have to be are people facing a choice they don’t want to publicly acknowledge. And, I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want their jobs right now.

However, my job is point out that as of July 16, they’re all acting as if everybody is prepared to move forward with their routine. And with all due to respect to Jones and Whitman, it’s not because it’s in the “best interest of the student-athletes”, which was a line uttered by Jones less than five minutes into this presentation and repeated at nauseam. Go back and take a look at all the U of I professors who retweeted, liked and responded encouragingly to Milo Eifler’s tweets and comments to media questioning playing tackle football without a COVID-19 vaccine. They all saw a student questioning whether the authority intended to pursue a course of action in his best interest.

So, why are they moving forward with what is routine? I’ll give you about 78 million reasons. That number (78 million), in dollars, is what Illinois athletics generated from ticket sales and rights/licensing fees in 2019, according to USA Today’s annual database. So, here’s the public plan: 1) Bills and salaries must be paid. 2) Therefore, football is to be played in the fall. 3) For a full explanation review of No. 2, please refer to the No. 1.

And this money argument is going unsaid publicly because it’s favorability polls at about the level of telling a toddler to eat their vegetables or, apparently, mandating a fully grown American human to wear a cloth face mask in public. It’s, on the best of days, a 50/50 proposition of being positively received. Simply put, it’s not a popular take. It’s also reality. Illinois, specifically, needs at least a piece of that $78 million revenue. Not want, need.

Those in power with college football, which has no governing body and no NCAA control over its championship, have adopted a Jordan Belfort philosophy. Belfort, a man who pled guilty to felonies including securities fraud and money laundering in 1999 and was the star figure played by Leonardo DeCaprio in the movie ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, famously said in his published book “there’s no nobility in poverty.”

In what they call public transparency, Illinois athletics is trying to avoid poverty, plain and simple. And let me be extremely clear, I can’t entirely blame them. I, like a lot of others, would just wish they’d say just that is the reason. At least then, maybe we could all understand why a partially tone deaf presentation on July 16, 2020 was warranted. 

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Matthew Stevens
MATTHEW STEVENS

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