Higher education

You send your kids to college to learn how to think critically, so kudos to Texas A&M and Ole Miss. They're doin' their job, even if it occasionally makes a few folks squirm a bit.

Say hello to Keeath Magee II, a linebacker from A&M, and MoMo Sanogo, a linebacker from Ole Miss. They don't share a campus or an allegiance, but they do share an inquiring mind.

The other day both of them raised questions that ought to have answers but don't, as college football rushes headlong toward a season that smells increasingly like a pratfall waiting to happen. Magee and Sanogo were two of several student-athletes on a conference call with SEC officials, and essentially they wanted to know this: How are you gonna pull this off on college campuses full of, well, college kids?

Sanogo wanted to know why Ole Miss was planning on bringing thousands of students back to campus for fall classes, and wondered how on earth he was going to make it through a season without showing red and going into quarantine.

"How can y'all help us?" he asked.

Magee, meanwhile, wondered how the conference could start the season when so many questions had no answers.

"You guys have answered a lot of questions the best way you guys could, and we really appreciate it," Magee said. "But as much as you guys don't know ... it's just kind of not good enough.

"We want to play. We want to see football. We want to return to normal as much as possible. But it's just with all this uncertainty ... I feel like the college campus is the one thing that you can't control."

How the SEC officials answered this was revealing to say the least.

Basically they said, look, there's gonna be Bastard Plague positives on every team in the conference. That can't be helped. Everyone will just have to deal with it.

I don't know what you hear in that. But what I hear is: Look, if some of you get sick, some of you get sick. But we got us some apparel brands to pimp and some revenue to stream, so you'll just have to make the best of it. We'll keep you as safe as we can, but there are no guarantees.

Say this much for the Bastard Plague. It does strip away the veneer from a thing.

In this case what's behind the veneer is the obvious truth that college football on the SEC level is a bidness, as the Blob has pointed out umpteen times. The people who run it don't want that to get out, however, which is why college football can't do what the NBA and NHL are doing. It can't put its football players in a bubble, because that would be a glaring admission they're not just college kids like anyone else, but a major financial asset that must be protected.

Sometimes, though, the financial assets do learn to think critically. And maybe they learn a little history while they're at it.

Back in 1918, for instance, there was another Bastard Plague. It killed over half-a-million Americans at a time when America was much smaller -- and it messed up college football, which admittedly was not then an engine of commerce but the rugged diversion it was always intended to be.

And so there was no Army-Navy game that fall. The Missouri Valley Conference canceled its season entirely. So did LSU, that football hotbed. Notre Dame played only six games.

And, yes, fans wore masks to the games.

I don't know if that's what college football will look like this fall. But if they get much into October before the whole deal comes unstitched, I'll frankly be stunned.

At least two college kids I can think of won't be, however.