I'm not sure I've seen SDS ever publish a piece quite THIS obviously intended as pure red meat for the extreme right wing commenting base here. Need some clicks? Yell at the media! I'm surprised you didn't refer to them as "the enemy of the people" but you got close enough. Guess what, you're eating your own. I read articles on this very site detailing extreme doubt and concern over playing. But it became clear that didn't play well and you got some people yelling in the comments. So let's just yell at Dan Wolken instead and get a Trump Rally going in the comments. This article is an embarrassment to SDS. Do better.

I can't believe all of these snowflakes talking about not watching football anymore because the intro song the NFL got changed. Pulling the race card at the slightest opportunity! People these days just get triggered by the smallest things. This cancel culture is really ruining America, IMO.

Thank you. You will be villified here. But it's good to know that even here there is sanity.

I was referring to US deaths.

I would make an argument here, but honestly what is the use? This place is of one mind and one mind only, and dissent will not be tolerated here. That much is clear. I'm done with SDS. To be clear, not because this particularly comment is egregious; it's not. But it's a place where anything differing from a full-on, heavily right wing, always pro-school, never pro player type attitude is shouted down. It's a place where I've had to endure my school being called Hunger Strike U and Antifa U since 2015. Screw it. I'm done with it. This could be a decent place. I certainly am not upset that a majority of people lean right, that is to be expected on a SEC blog, but it's too much, it's too aggressive. You can have it to yourselves.

Some, perhaps even most of these demands are clearly over the top. 50% revenue sharing isn't happening, obviously. But I put this far more on the NCAA and its member institutions than these players. After exploiting student athletes for decades, they're throwing them out there (or at least trying to) in order to save their bottom lines. They're doing it without anywhere near adequate protections, and even trying to get them to sign liability waivers in some cases. Do you know what happens when you horrible mistreat a group of people you are reliant on for decades upon decades? Eventually the bill comes due and they are done with your BS. These players are done with the BS. No, not all of their demands are reasonable, but what has been asked of them, and particularly what is being asked of them now, in the midst of a pandemic is also completely unreasonable. Given the choice of castigating rich middle aged adults or largely poor 18-22 year olds when both are making wildly unreasonable demands, I'm going to spend more time worrying about the former group and less on the latter.

Yeah, no. 2007 was a wild, fun, amazing season where a lot of underdogs were good, and a lot of favorites got upset. It was fun for the reasons that college football is supposed to be fun. The "wildness" in 2020 will come from delayed games, players (maybe a very small percentage, but there will be some) getting very sick and possibly dying, coaches ending up on ventilators, and mountains of regret for having a season when it's it's obviously and wildly irresponsible to do so. It will be wild in the sense that massive numbers of unpaid athletes will risk their health to try to save athletic department bottom lines. It will be wild in the sense that it will be a sad and desperate farce to attempt to mimic "normalcy" when we can only have normalcy by controlling a virus that has killed more people than WWI, and may approach WWII before this is over. Let's not act like this is going to be a fun, wild, zany year. It's going to be a bloody disaster and no one will come out clean.

It has no real correlation to his success on the field. I will say his (very short, admittedly) record as HC was more successful than Dooley's prior to becoming Tennessee's head coach, and he's done a good job on the recruiting trail despite not having a lot of clear advantages early on. I'm not saying he's going to be a great coach. He might be the second coming of Gary Pinkel and win the SEC East multiple times, he might be as bad as Chad Morris and be gone by 2022. How is one to know? I am just saying he's making the best of what has otherwise been a dreadfully depressing offseason.

I have no idea if Drink's a good SEC head coach, but he's exceedingly likeable and charismatic. Hard not to like him.

Yeah probably a fair assessment

I just don't understand how this helps. I guess it gives a couple extra bye weeks for all the inevitable games that will be delayed due to high numbers of positive tests to be rescheduled. But I don't know how 10 games instead of 12 is a game changer. The SEC already encompasses many (like, most) of the worst states in terms of COVID spread/management, so it's not like we're protecting ourselves from anything or anyone.

Kentucky. Never trust a "Tennessee is on the rise" narrative.

Based purely on talent, 10th seems low for Mizzou, since this defense was decidedly an upper half unit in the league even later in the year after Cale Garrett went down. With that said, whenever there is a coaching change, there are questions. In this case, I think it's made much less by the fact that Walters was retained, but you never know. Things can be weird in Year 1 for a new HC. So, I think it's a little low, but given there's a good bit of uncertainty, including whether the team will even take the field at any point before September 2021, it's not worth getting worked up about.

The NCAA has totally punted on dealing with this crisis. Which, honestly, whatever. No one respects the NCAA anymore. If they push the power 5 conferences too far in a direction they don't want to go, they'll just leave the NCAA. They probably will anyway in the near future. College presidents and conferences will decide this. The FBS championship isn't even a NCAA event. They know they don't control this and they're not going to try.

"We now know that college programs can make student athletes more safe than they were are home statistically" Mind citing your data source on that?

Well, now folks are inciting violence on here

Did I wander into a Trump rally, or what?

You are a Vanderbilt fan. You do not get to talk about entitled universities.

(for the record, a 50/50 revenue split, especially at this moment, is a total non-starter, but the suggestion is literally the opposite of Marxism. Marxism is an actually philosophy, very probably a bad one, but it has a definition, and you can't actually just use it to describe any particular thing you don't like without sounding very silly)

Yeah, I agree. People wanting to be paid their market value to work is fundamentally Marxist. A much more capitalist system would be for everyone to just work together for the common good, trusting their leaders at their conferences and universities will provide for them instead of worrying about their own compensation or self-interest. This is totally how capitalism works, and we definitely don't have this completely backwards or anything.

Let's take this point by point. 1. "There is no slowing down option for virus spreading until the whole shootin match is almost over." Simply not a correct statement. We know that avoiding large groups can slow the spread. There is much evidence to suggest that widespread mask usage can slow the spread. Can we STOP the spread in a pre-vaccine world? Likely not. But we can slow it down. We know how to do it. Other countries have successfully done so. Look, I know in some circles, attempts to bend the curve down are seen as "living in fear" or even unpatriotic. On the contrary, as Americans, when faced with a difficult problem, when have we ever said "we can't totally fix it, so even though we can do things to help, let's throw our hands up and surrender?" No. I reject that, utterly. 2. Leading infectious disease experts state that a vaccine could very plausibly be available by the end of the year or early next. No vaccine effort this massive has ever been attempted. Several different vaccines have experienced success in trials and are already in the late stages of those trials, while simultaneously initiating production in the case that the final stages are successful. There is no guarantee of a vaccine, but there is much reason to hope one will be available-and soon. 3. Will college football be the difference between the curve bending up or down on a nationwide scale? Of course not. Literally no one is arguing that. But the point is, we need to avoid large gatherings. Say, gatherings of several hundred people in an activity where social distancing is patently impossible. If we're doing that as a society, why should football be special? Why is it an exception? It makes no logical sense.

Saturday Down South doesn't have a sarcasm font, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the moment, especially given you've had a decent number of posts that have made sense. But if not, I mean, way to raise (lower?) the bar here, man.

Eh... nevermind. This is way too stupid to address

Yup.

I know people who died from this. Shut up.

Honestly Arkansas would have probably been better off just hiring him as HC.

The equivalent to 9/11 in terms of American death are happening EVERY FEW DAYS due to a pandemic. So yeah forgive me for not jumping for joy, okay? This is like saying it's being overly negative for someone about to be hit by a train to focus on being hit by a train, when in reality they ought to be focusing on the fact that the train seems to be running okay otherwise.

He won't lose any arguments, he'll just be shouted down by the usual very loud SDS contingent that refuses to have a serious fact based discussion that doesn't devolve into middle school level name calling.

@LSUMC: You responded to me on a thread a few days ago on another thread saying my comments about COVID prove that "the virus has me scared". Well, I work somewhere that has very little internet/cell service during the week so I didn't see that until today, so since I see you're going about the same ways, calling people idiots and such, we're going to do this now. I am 27 years old. I am in perfect health. I have no pre-existing conditions that would give me more than a vanishingly small chance of ending up a hospital, or even getting seriously ill if I contract this virus. So, you are wrong. Categorically so. I also know someone who died of COVID on Thursday of last week. I have two grandparents in nursing homes. I want them to live. I want the person who died not to have died. If that's fear, you have me there. I resent your callous attitude. I consider it a personal affront to the people I care about who are affected by this. I know you won't care, and will probably respond either dismissively, or angrily. That's fine. Free country. But this isn't an abstract crisis or fake news. It's (curse word redacted) killing people, and will kill more people yet. It's tearing apart families. This is real, and I'm thoroughly exhausted by this crap. That is all. Have a good Saturday.

You are correct, of course, but you will be shouted down on this forum. It is what it is. There are some reasonable people here, but there are a lot of much louder people who are not.