Quite a few hot taeks flying around the interwebs today from the woke sportswriter set expressing their butthurt over the Big Ten ramping up football next month.
The gist: the COVID!
As in, how can they let kids play football, because of the risks.
Wide swaths of these folks are lamenting how they just can’t watch college football this season.
Because: the COVID!
Hypocrites.
No one from this group bats an eye at CTE.
Which is a far greater risk, to a massive group of players.
Every year a person plays tackle football, their risk of developing CTE later in life spikes 30 percent.
Brains of former football players analyzed for a 2017 study showed CTE present in 99 percent of former NFL players and 91 percent of former college players.
Seems a guarantee, then, that the Big Ten kids are going to get CTE.
Maybe 20 percent of them contract COVID, and that’s high side.
Of that 20 percent, maybe a couple end up hospitalized, though we don’t have any reports of that nature to date, so that’s guesstimating.
The all-age recovery rate from COVID is over 99.5 percent, and for 18- to 24-year-olds, it’s greater than 99.95 percent.
Some of you will want to @me about long-term effects.
We’re six months into this; you know no more about long-term effects from COVID than you do about life on Venus.
(Actually, we know more about life on Venus. Seems that there might be something there. Whoda thunk it.)
Aside from the CTE, the handwringers had no problem watching (and making a living from) games involving kids who practice year-round, fly all over the country, balance all of this with progress toward a degree, putting their bodies, their future health, on the line, without being compensated.
The sportswriters aren’t making much, but they’re at least able to pay rent and put beer in the fridge.
And if we’re going to go there, might as well also point out the hypocrisy of how college football is paid for.
The other kids, the ones not playing football, pay student fees that help the B1G schools balance their budgets, and at the non-Power 5 schools, make up the bulk of them.
Those other kids not playing football, incidentally, it’s not like they have trust funds to draw down from.
Most are working one or two jobs and taking out tens of thousands in student loans that will haunt them into the midlife crisis that they also won’t be able to afford.
Some of that money is going to pay for the football that the sportswriters had no problem watching until virtue-signaling became the way to get over.
I’ve been a sportswriter for 25 years, and it took me until a few years ago to realize that a lot of folks in my line of work really loathe their jobs, which, I guess, most people in most lines of work loathe their jobs, but seriously, sportswriting?
Sportswriting ain’t real work.
I know, breaking news there.
But if these guys and gals want to opt out, I think it’s only fair that they have that opportunity.
Every fast-food place that you drive by these days is hiring.
The Burger King that I worked at in high school gave you half off on your meals.
Half off a two-Whopper meal, and you get to keep your head held high.
That’s win-win right there.
Column by Chris Graham
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