If you spend a lot of time following college football and not a lot of time following the presidential electoral process, the first thing I have to tell you is: Good for you. You’re lucky. And probably a lot happier than if it were vice versa.

However, maybe you want to follow the election a little more intensely. Maybe you’re in college and want to understand how this Bernie guy is going to help you avoid paying off your student loans, and how come Garth Brooks is so fond of him. I’m here to help.

The first thing to understand is that the primaries are sort of like bowl season. It begins with a trickle with relatively unimportant and (save for one) underpopulated states. Iowa. Then New Hampshire. Off to Nevada. And now South Carolina. These state primaries are sort of like those pre-New Year’s Day bowls. They’re your Pinstripe, Gasparilla, Boca Raton and Military (not to be confused with Armed Forces, and why would you?) Bowls.

Then comes “Super Tuesday!” That’s when 14 states hold their primaries all on the same day. It’s like New Year’s Day and just like New Year’s Day, you’re best equipped to deal with the results if nursing a hangover (or nurturing one) and in flannel pajamas. Do not go outside. Do not stand near Chris Matthews (particularly if you’re a female).

Now, just like our current bowl system, New Year’s Day is not the be all and end all of the bowl season as it once was. And Super Tuesday is not the end of primary season. While the two most populous state in the union (California and Texas) vote on Super Tuesday, you’ve still got Florida and Illinois (March 17), New York and Pennsylvania (April 28), and a host of other states afterward.

And then, just like college football, the primaries end and it all goes dormant for too long a period and just when you think you’ve emotionally moved on, they stage the national championship. And while it always seems as if it’s the same two teams (Bush and Clinton), there’s been some new blood lately.

News out of Switzerland: the Swiss just canceled the Engadin Ski Marathon, which is one of the nation’s largest annual sporting events. They’ve also canceled the Geneva Auto Show and have banned all events that would draw upwards of 1,000 people between now and March 15. Beware the Ides of March? The Swiss say Wait until the Ides of March.

It is befitting a nation that gave the world its most utilitarian implement to adopt an “ounce of prevention” mentality towards the pandemic. But that’s the Swiss. They love utility and precision and they follow logic. They can’t afford not to.

Then you have America, where the prevailing attitude is Supersize It and I’ll worry about the problems later. So while the White House tells us, not in so many words, “to go shopping and visit the malls” (remember Bush 43’s sage advice?), the virus will likely gain purchase here in the next fortnight. Maybe not so many deaths, but more cases. Because President Trump believes all you need to do to curtail the virus is cancel all incoming flights from China (a good move, sure, but far from the only one).

Come March 15 we’ll have more coronavirus cases in the U.S., perhaps even in red states (How did the Dems spread it to Dixie, they’ll ask?). And the NCAA tournament, a cavalcade of convocations of thousands of people, most of whom don’t wash their hands after using the men’s room, will be ready to get underway.

What then? I doubt anyone at CBS or the NCAA want to talk about it (and I don’t know if College GameDay has discussed it this morning), but this could become a thing and quickly.

Purely from a marketing standpoint, here’s how I’d rearrange the calendar:

–Take two days out of January, so the month lasts 29 days (it’s most of our least favorite month)

–Put the two days at the end of February, so it’s a 30-day month.

–During Leap Year, tack on the extra day to the end of June. Or September. Who’s gonna mind?

But JDub, you don’t understand, it has to do with lunar cycles and blabity blah blah and—WHO CARES? We all do whatever our smartphone tells us to do. I don’t see any of my neighbors out there measuring the azimuth of the moon on the horizon. Shut your trap, Copernicus, and go along with the flow.

Get ready to see a lot more of this guy on television. His name is Donald McNeil and he is a science and health reporter at The New York Times. He is an expert on viral epidemics and while not a physician, he speaks more plainly than they do and more honestly than a White House official will.

Last night McNeil appeared on Maddow and while he did not make the time to wear a suit, or even a blazer, he did make himself clear. And he also wore a pen in the breast pocket of his buttoned plaid shirt. Nerd Alert!

McNeil on Mick Mulvaney’s assertion that the virus isn’t dangerous because it’s not as lethal as the 1918 swine flu: “He’s completely right about the lethality rate and he’s completely wrong about the danger.” McNeil noted that if this pandemic continues to spread at the rate it has that it could be contracted by one-third of of humanity and, if so, then that means it could kill “millions of people… many millions, in fact.”

Other things he said: “What will worry me is when one emergency room that gets four cases of pneumonia a week suddenly gets 40 cases per week.”

–“Eventually we’ll have one-third of our Congress with the coronavirus and we’ll have to shut down our parliament.”

–“Pandemic, worst possible scenario, we’d need 750,000 ventilators in this country. Right now we have about 75,000. And a ventilator costs $25- to $50,000. It’s like buying a car.”

–“That’s a big scandal, the fact that we are now testing as much as Italy is. We should be testing lots, lots more people that have undiagnosed pneumonia.”

That last quote makes me wonder. I’ve heard two random stories in the past two months of healthy young men dying of pneumonia. One was ESPN reporter Edward Aschoff, the other a friend of a friend here in New York City who was 30. Aschoff died just before Christmas, this other young man right after MLK Day. Looking back, and I know it won’t bring either man back, I wonder if either had this virus. Would anyone have even thought to have looked for it a month, two months ago?

This actually aired on Fox News. His father-in-law passed away from the coronavirus. He’s coughing. He coughs into his right hand and then touches his daughter’s hands (and kids never put their fingers in their mouths, ever). Then, as if he hasn’t already made sure that he’s already passed whatever he may have to her, he takes the water bottle from her, drinks from it, and then returns it.

The dumb, it’s so all-consuming.