College Football Is BACK!
It’s a holiday, so what do you say we start with a little quiz?
Tell me, does this Friday night video from Lane Stadium at Virginia Tech give you goosebumps? Or fill you with fear?
How about this one, shot Saturday at the University of Wisconsin?
Or this from Saturday night in Scott Stadium in Charlottesville? (If you squint you can see me. I wore blue instead of orange, because, in the words of Leigh Anne Touhy, “orange is not in my color wheel”)
College football is back, baby, and those of us who railed against restrictions last year - arguing that viruses don’t spread easily outdoors and that the people most vulnerable were over the age of 80 and probably not in the stands for college football, anyway - couldn’t be happier.
Governors ignored us - and the science last year - creating arbitrary crowd size limits and turning the 2020 college football season into a giant clusterfart. Shoot, Old Dominion University - governed by Extreme Karens - was the only school in its conference to scrap its entire season out of fear.
Pure idiocy.
It’s clear from the weekend that players, coaches, schools, students and fans have had enough. Football stadiums across the country were packed. (But not as crowded as the Lollapalooza music festival with its 400K attendees in Illinois a few weeks ago, which oddly enough, enjoyed little outcry over the size of that gathering.) By Saturday night, social media was full of lemon-sucking pearl clutchers wishing death on football fans.
Best of all, sideline reporters stopped participating in pandemic theater by no longer standing 10 feet away from coaches and players, mumbling through masks. You could actually hear them!
Look, once vaccines became available to anyone who wanted them Covid became endemic instead of pandemic. People are now making their own choices about risk.
This virus will be with us for a very long time. Vaccines render it less serious. Excellent therapeutics can treat it. Oh, and Covid-19 doesn’t care about your silly cloth mask or your lockdowns. That ought to be clear to everyone by now. You might as well carry a rabbit’s foot for supernatural protection from the coronavirus.
If scenes of college football fans having fun are triggering, change the channel. I’m sure there’s some tragic movie you can watch on HBO.
Leave those of us who simply want to find our seats, cheer our hearts out and stay till they pick up the cups alone.
