Couldas and shouldas

And now they're all saying this: America needs college football.

Coaches are saying it and players are saying it and Congress critters are saying it, and even Our Only Available President and his store mannequin Vice-President are saying it. Apparently Ohio State-Michigan is as vital to the national interest as food, water and shelter from the storm. Who knew.

But now the Big Ten and the Pac-12 are pushing football to next spring, which may or may not just be kicking a particularly disagreeable can down the road. And people are acting as if some inalienable constitutional right has been, well, alienable-d.

Again, who knew.

What I know is this: No college football this fall, at least in this part of the country, sucks pond water. I hate it. We all hate it. No argument there.

But America will not crumble to dust because we don't get it. None of us will die a grisly death if we don't get our three-plus hours of college kids breathing on each other in the middle of a pandemic for the greater glory of their athletic departments' apparel deals.

Those athletic departments are going to be hurtin' puppies because that won't happen this fall. But maybe if they stopped paying even their assistant football coaches like NFL royalty they wouldn't be hurtin' quite so bad. It's a thought.

Alabama just handed offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian a new $2.5-million-a-year deal. Head coach Nick Saban, meanwhile,  has 13 special consultants on his payroll in addition to Sarkisian and the rest of his staff. And over at Clemson, head coach Dabo Swinney pulls down nine mill a year.

 All to coach college kids. College kids.

So there's that.

There's also this: If America needed college football so badly, it should have taken the Bastard Plague more seriously.

Our national leaders, such as they are, should have listened when they were warned about this as far back as the end of last year. Our Only Available Impeached President should have treated it as the public health crisis it was instead of trafficking in silly conspiracy theories and voodoo remedies, and practicing political spin.

Maybe if he'd taken it seriously, America would have. And we'd still have Big Ten football this fall. Instead, inspired by OOAIP's example, America spent the summer throwing massive sandbar hoedowns, caterwauling about wearing masks and staging armed takeovers of statehouses over the imagined tyranny of public health initiatives.

America needed college football?

Well. It should have acted like it did, then.

But we're halfway through August now and we're up to 164,000 dead and more than 5 million infected -- probably considerably more -- with no end in sight. And we're still acting like it's no big deal.

A quarter-million mask-less motorcycle enthusiasts cramming Sturgis, S.D., for ten days? Bringing 40,000 students back to campus, expecting them to be totally responsible and, you know, not act like college kids?

Sure. What could happen?

Besides no college football, that is. Darn the luck.

Not that luck has had anything to do with it.