What It’s Really About
We have no idea if fall college sports will be played this year, or to what degree…there’s growing talk that we’ll have fall and winter sports, but they’ll be played in the spring instead of their normal times.
Last week, anticipating a million dollar shortfall in revenue, the Panther athletic department took a number of steps, including salary cuts and cancelling incentives. Later that same day came word that the Big Ten would only play conference games, meaning the UNI-Iowa football game was off…and meaning another $650,000 in revenue would be lost to UNI.
That’s the first thing…UNI was going to get $650,000 just for playing that one football game.
The second is how silly the Big Ten’s policy is. The idea is that they can limit team’s travel and exposure to COVID-19 by only playing conference games. That’s quaint, but flat out wrong. Iowa will travel to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Minnesota under this plan…but teams from Ames and Cedar Falls won’t go to Iowa City. I suppose it could be worse, that this could be the year Iowa would travel to New Jersey and Maryland…both in the conference.
I’m not one of those honks who thinks we should require the in-state teams to play one another…but for the Big Ten to claim traveling out of state is automatically better is a lousy excuse for what’s really going on…trying to retain all their conference TV revenue, making sure teams don’t get sick playing non-conference games that would wreck the big money season. It has very little to do with the health of the athletes.
Then again, the way sports are these days, that’s consistent with how the athletes have been treated all along.
