Some questions

 Maybe it takes a Mike Krzyzewski to ask how they got that elephant in this room. And maybe it takes Duke basketball behaving in a distinctly un-Duke-ian manner for him to ask it.

So you can thank Illinois, sort of, for getting Coach K to wonder why the hell we're playing these games, because the Illini thumped the Dukies by 15 the other night and that led to Coach K wondering the aforementioned. Which of course sounded a mite self-serving, or at least like a guy who'd rather not be watching his team play right now. 

To his credit, Krzyzewski acknowledged as much in his comments. To his further credit, he wondered what he wondered anyway. 

"I would just like for the safety, the mental and physical health of players and staff to assess where we're at," is how he put it.

Also: "We're just plowing through this."

Also, also: "Not sure who leads college basketball."

All of this, of course, is in response to whoever runs major college buckets deciding to jump right into the season, and damn the pandemic. The Bastard Plague is rampaging, but college buckets would go on even though the Plague has reduced college football to a lunatic ball of canceled games and inconsistent edicts.

(A word about that: Of course the Big Ten eliminated its former edict about teams having to play six football games to get into the conference title game. This is because Ohio State is clearly the league's best team, and also because it's 2020 and there are no edicts worth the name. And no whinging about that, Indiana fans. You had your shot at the Buckeyes and missed.)

Now where were we?

Oh, yeah. College buckets.

It's games-games-games there, full speed ahead, and now the 'Rona is creeping into the basketball programs, too. And Coach K, the man most qualified to do so, is all but asking about that damn elephant.

Because, see, when he wonders "What the hell are we doing?", he already knows the answer, The answer is "Making cash while we can in a cash-poor year on the backs of our unpaid workforce."

Krzyzewski would never say that, of course. But one question naturally leads to others these days.

What the hell is college basketball doing?

Why are they flying student-athletes all over the country in the middle of a raging pandemic?

And if the "student" actually came before the "athlete," would they be doing it?

And how do you therefore claim, with a straight face, that they are not a workforce in everything but name?

A workforce generates revenue for whom it works. It does so, sometimes and to varying degrees, at the risk of its health and well-being. Because it's bidness, and that's how bidness works.

How is that dynamic any different than that between "student-athletes" and college athletics?

And is that a question the people who run college athletics run away from as fast as they can? And why the NCAA was adamantly silent in response to Krzyzewski's comments?

So many questions. So many sharp points in them on which to impale oneself.