Your moment of foreboding

And, yeah, I hear you: Here he goes again, HATING SPORTS.

Well, fine. If you think a former sportswriter who made his living covering sports did it because he hates sports and not because, you know, he actually loves sports, maybe ...

Well. Vaya con dios. May your illogic sustain you.

Because, listen, it's a downer being Davey Downer all the time. It's no fun being That Guy, the one who's always calling timeout on magical thinking and pointing out that unicorns are not real. I'd much rather believe college football is going to happen this fall -- that the season will go off strangely but without a hitch, and that the SEC and ACC are gonna pull this off and make the Big Ten and Pac-12 look like a bunch of trembling fainthearts.

If that happens, I'll be leading the cheers. I will.

However ...

("Oh, here he goes with the 'however,'" you all just said)

However ... did you see what happened at the University of North Carolina this week?

Students have barely been back on campus a week and already UNC administrators are shutting everything down and going to remote learning again. That's because 177 students already are in isolation and 349 in quarantine, in a week. And that's because, well, they're college kids.

They're gonna do what they do, restrictions or no restrictions. And that includes -- to a lesser extent, perhaps -- college football players.

You can keep 'em in a bubble, until you can't. Sooner or later they're gonna have to go to class, if for no other reason than to maintain the fiction they're actually part of the university they represent. If you're gonna call them "student-athletes", then you've got to have them at least act the student part.

And that's where the wicket gets sticky. Because what happens when more North Carolinas happen, as it's damn near inevitable they will?

I don't know how this all works, because we're in undiscovered country here, obviously. But if your school won't allow the student body on campus, does that mean the football players, too?  Or do they do everything remotely but football?

Because if that's the case, you're admitting what everyone already knows: College football players are there to play football, period. The rules that apply to actual students don't apply to them. They are a wholly separate entity governed by a wholly separate set of prerogatives within the university framework.

I'm not saying this is bad, understand. College football at the Power 5 level has been Alabama Football Inc. and Ohio State Football Inc. for a long time now. It's a profitable business. It's terrific entertainment. It's just not what it's been sold to us as being.

Allowing college football to continue without the college part, or least the college part's essence, just confirms all of that. And what are merely rumbles now of a nascent players' collective will become more than just rumbles as a result.

If you're gonna treat 'em like a workforce, they're gonna act like a workforce. And they'll want some concessions if the university is going to expose them to a virulent pathogen in a way it won't expose its non-revenue-producing student body.

In any event, this is Rubicon moment for the sport. The façade will be gone, and there'll be no rebuilding it. The only alternative is to decree college football can't happen without the physical presence of what makes the college, the college: The students.

And that means more North Carolinas. Which means football players winding up in quarantine, too, unless you give up the charade entirely and seal them off from the rest of the campus. If not ...

Well. You know. It's not like I have to say it.

Or want to.