It Sure Doesn't Feel Like the Start of Another College Football Season

Pandemic football shutdown leaves Big Ten country with empty sadness.

 This should be a day of exhilarating excitement. Instead, it feels like a day of mourning, this day that should have been the first full college football Saturday of another season.

In a simpler time, people in Big Ten country might have awakened pondering the implications of Indiana’s Friday night lights visit to Wisconsin, the first conference game of the season. Camp Randall Stadium on a Friday night? Wild.

They might have planned their day around two more conference openers, Northwestern at Michigan State and Purdue at Nebraska.

Did the wily Hoosiers give the Badgers a game? Would Pat Fitzgerald’s Wildcats, who have been slow starters in recent seasons, find their early legs against the sagging Spartans, playing their first game under rebuilder Mel Tucker?

And oh, those non conference games. Michigan at Washington sharing top billing with Alabama-USC.

Actually, the college-football world might have been more interested in Trojans-Tide because of their impeccable pedigrees. Stodgy Midwestern skeptics, though, would have decided USC, which has been a shadow of its former self for too long, would merely be a squeaky toy for Alabama, which has been the gold standard under Nick Saban.

In Big Ten country, Michigan-Washington loomed large. A very challenging opener for underperforming Jim Harbaugh? Who could resist that? Either the Wolverines over-achieve or the Ann Arbor angst mounts. And either way, there’s The Jim Harbaugh Show.

And then, there would have been all those little Big Ten tuneups, plus all of those intersectional under-card meetings.

What do we have instead?

In the Midwest, nothing now. And nothing later.

Ohio State fans (pictured above) gathered last week outside Ohio Stadium to protest the cancellation of the Big Ten season.

If you're excited about Middle Tennessee-Army and BYU-Navy, I'm happy for you.

I do not want to re-litigate the radical and misguided decision of Big Ten leaders (not legends) who pulled the plug on the season too soon. On optics alone, they should have known they needed to just kick the can down the road, the way others were doing.

This season will begin with an unsatisfying plate of meager Week 1 morsels. Time will tell how far this season goes amid mass quarantines of fraternity and sorority houses, online learning and university presidents stomping their feet at 20-year-olds who insist on flirting around kegs of lukewarm beer. 

When I launched into a lament the other day that the Big Ten should have waited before canceling its season, I got a surprising response from friends who are hardcore Wisconsin fans.

I expected them to agree with me. Instead, they were on the side of pandemic safety. The argument? Not only does playing football put the players at risk for a virus that has medical implications no one fully understands yet.

This also sets a bad example, they said. We are in a pandemic that has had a stranglehold on the nation for six months, with no end in sight. How can these players mingle with off-the-rails students in class and dubious social gatherings without fanning the pandemic flames?

And if college football can be played, how can bars,  restaurants and other businesses be ordered to close? And if all of these activities continue before the virus is reined in, how is it ever going to be contained?

These are not casual sports fans. These are people whose license plate says, ``BADGERS,’’ with a minor one-letter alteration. People whose son played college football and now works for guess-which NFL team.

But they are also people who want to spend time with their grandsons, people who are fearful of those grandsons mingling with grade-school children in classrooms and on the football field. How do they hug that?

I hope these people who are so cock-sure that it’s OK to play college football are not wrong. I have a feeling that while fans are good with the decision for other people to play while they sit on their couch, the decision-makers are not nearly as confident that this is going to end up well.

Other than believing the Big Ten should have stayed in step and kicked the can down the road, I don’t know the answer to this dilemma.

I just know that I want the Week 1 Saturday we were supposed to have. . . Not the one we have.