Tackled for a loss

By now, we all know who Dr. Anthony Fauci is. He's that annoying parent who periodically shows up to tell us to eat our lima beans or we won't get any dessert.

He's the national scold who fengs our shui, harshes our mellow, crashes our Pretend World party with a six-pack of Reality Beer -- which is even more gross than that cheap crap you drank in college.

(He's also, according to the Grassy Knoll People, the errand boy for the Medical Deep State. Which as we all know really exists and is run by Bill Gates, who wants to use a COVID-19 vaccine to Implant Microchips In Our Bodies and Control Us With His Evil Vulcan Mind Meld. I think Hillary, George Soros and the Klingons are involved, too, but frankly I can't keep up with the crazy.)

In any case, here the good doctor was again the other day, and this time he went too far. This time he went after football.

Said, sorry, dreamers and Domers, but if the NFL (or the colleges) don't figure out a way to play in a COVID-19 "bubble," they probably shouldn't play at all. Because the Bastard Plague isn't going anywhere any time soon, and in fact is staging a massive comeback in states that decided it was a violation of their citizens' constitutional rights to wear a mask or practice social distancing, and so (with a wave of their magic wands, presumably) declared the Plague to be over.

Which brings to Texas, of course.

Where the Texas Longhorns football team arrived on campus this week to begin voluntary workouts, and immediately ran into a snag. Thirteen players tested positive for the Bastard Plague and immediately went into quarantine, along with 10 more identified through contact tracing. So 23 of the 58 players who showed up are now unavailable to head coach Tom Herman.

You don't need major cognitive powers to see how this ends, especially with university presidents and governors declaring that, by golly, our college campuses will be open for business this fall. The students will come back and, being college kids, largely ignore the good-faith protocols put in place by their universities. And they'll start contracting and spreading the virus.

Minus Dr. Fauci's bubble, they'll mingle with some of the football players, who will then also start showing red for the Plague.

Which will mean more quarantining.

Which will in turn further disrupt preparations for the season.

Which will in turn force schedules to be altered, games moved or canceled, the entire season thrown into a big fat jolly ball of hot mess.

Of course, this is just theoretically speaking. But how you can not see it going down this way?

And so if there's going to be football, it's going to have to be all kinds of different. Circumstances will compel it. There's simply no other rational way to look at it without retreating to Pretend World, where the virus will magically disappear the moment they tee it up, because by God no Bastard Plague is going to take on football.

In the meantime, in the real world, 120,000 Americans are now dead of the Plague in less than four months. That's more than twice as many Americans as died in Vietnam in 15 years. And the death toll keeps rising by roughly 1,000 a day.

Which means the good doctor is probably right, dammit. It's gonna be football in a bubble.

And we're not talking about the bubble screen, either.