by Wendell Barnhouse

At the time this is being written (late morning Wednesday), the College Sports Industrial Complex was at full production levels. That’s because it’s the third month of the year. It’s March Madness, dammit, and who cares if a panic over a pandemic has the libtards yelling at clouds. We must have our basketball.

By the time you read this, perhaps sanity and reality will have prevailed. COVID-19, thanks to President Mewling Quim (it’s Shakespeare; Google it for a giggle), is sweeping the country like the latest viral video. Spoiler alert: This is a viral VIRUS that could kill your older relatives.

Many medical experts have said that the disease spreads in crowds or where people are cooped up (cruise ships are petri dishes for the novel coronavirus). Dr. Anthony Fauci, the only member of the Trump administration* who is telling the truth, testified before Congress Wednesday. Among his comments : the virus is 10 times more lethal than the flu and that the NBA should be playing in empty arenas.

Governors in Washington and Ohio have asked that events that draw crowds be cancelled. There’s an NCAA regional scheduled for Spokane and two NCAA sites in Ohio. The Mid-American and Big West conference tournaments are being played sans-fans. But the big-time conferences –ACC, Big Ten, SEC, Pac-12, Big 12 – are conducting business as usual.

The Big 12 stages its men’s and women’s tournaments in downtown Kansas City. The men’s tourney, which starts tonight at the Sprint Center, will draw attendance that could reach 18,000 with fans from half-a-dozen states. Commissioner Bob Bowlsby, one of the fat cat CEOs of the CSIC, had this explanation for why the Big 12 was not playing in an empty arena: “I wouldn’t be attending if I felt it was unsafe.”

That is spectacular spinning. A comment like that evokes the image of fans being carried out of arenas or dropping dead because they breathed in air droplets infected with COVID-19. It’s, frankly, a shitty comment disconnected from reality. This is about another “s” word – spread.
It can take five days to two weeks for symptoms to appear. Those who get sick likely won’t die. It’s more likely that those who contract it will have the worst case of the flu they’ve ever experienced, and many
will require hospital care to help them breathe as they recover.

With COVID-19, we don’t know what we don’t know. Joe or Jane Citizen could have been in an elevator with someone who had the virus and perhaps was showing early stages of a “cold” – coughing, sneezing.
Joe/Jane would have no way of knowing they had been exposed. And the lack of testing – a cover up that could wind up being one of the biggest medical crimes in American history – makes it impossible to
know if you’ve got or if you don’t.

So, let’s say there are 10 Joes and 10 Janes who are carrying the coronavirus. They attend any conference or NCAA Tournament because they’re alums of Good Old State U or they love hoops. They each expose 10 more people. That’s 200. They attend other games or go back home – and each expose 10 more. It doesn’t require high-level math to understand the quantum leap of the spread.

The threat of an epidemic is that in two months our hospitals could be overflowing. That’s the case in Italy where doctors are having to triage patients; they’re having to decide who has the chance to live
and not treating those who will likely die.

What follows is the rant of a 66-year-old curmudgeon: We are a soft, selfish, lazy, entitled country, a citizenry who is too lazy to go out for dinner, wants everything delivered hot and fresh and bitches when the spinning circle of internet access lasts more than five seconds. And we must have our March
Madness, our bracket pools, our upsets, our dramatic buzzer beaters.

Dan Wolken of USA Today wrote Tuesday that the NCAA Tournament should be canceled because ofCOVID-19. He backed his opinion with reasonable arguments. Spoiler alert: His Twitter comments
accused him of writing to get clicks. The mouth breathers with double-digit followers attacked the message, not the meaning of the message.

Canceling March Madness is probably an overreaction. Playing in empty arenas is not. Championship Week, the prelude to the NCAA Tournament, is apparently going to draw hundreds of thousands of fans to arenas between now and Sunday. It’s irresponsible and ignorant for the show to go on.

The College Sports Industrial Complex is often irresponsible and ignorant to reality when being responsible and intelligent interferes with its mission: making money.