Express Word: The fall season that won't be, what's next and more

The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com's weekly, obviously, column covering Purdue football, basketball and recruiting, as well as college sports issues, the true meaning of life, or whatever other topics might come to mind in a given week.

I’ve never covered a story like this one, and I hope like hell I never have to again, one where a whole Big Ten season, and perhaps in time a whole college football season, blows up and my opinions on the matter vary so widely from one day to the next.

To hell with this virus. That’s the most important point I can make here. Screw you, COVID-19.

That’s what all of us have said to ourselves so many times the past few months, sometimes perhaps with language a bit more colorful, and the one inarguable reality in a time where damn near everything else is apparently arguable.

At the end of the day, the college football season isn’t the world’s, or this country’s, biggest problem. So many people have lost so much more than getting to watch or play football on Saturdays, tailgate and maybe melt down on an Internet message board after a loss. My heart goes out to those people and always will, as theoretical to me as most of them may be. I’ve been extremely fortunate in this regard, and I remind myself of that as often as I can.

But college football is our world, yours and mine, and I’ve staked my career on college sports. And the Big Ten's postponement of its fall season and move toward a highly unconventional spring season that itself remains as much a wish as a promise, it stung.

Like you, I’m frustrated, sad, a little angry over all this, but also understanding of the fact that this was the goddamn virus’ fault. It was the virus’ fault that there won’t be college football in the Big Ten this fall, Purdue included, or maybe/probably anywhere when all is said and done.

What happened this week — the Big Ten’s proactive postponement of its own season — didn’t just happen today. It’s been a Cuban Missile Crisis for months behind closed doors that came to yesterday's result. The hope of playing was built upon the assumption that America would have this virus under control to the point where it could be managed effectively enough to move forward with business as usual, or better said, business as highly unusual.

We had our shot, America. We had our shot back in May, June and July, and we spent it throwing coronaparties, melting down in Trader Joe's and shouting each other down on the Internet over every little piece of our reality, it's seemed, when we needed a united front.

But that's beside the point and a moot point at that.

And it may not have mattered in light of the concerns that led to the Big Ten commissioner and the university presidents he works with and for, 86 percent of whom reportedly voted against playing this fall during an initial vote, nixing the fall season.

You've read here the past few months more than I wish you had to about the dangers of the unknown and the perils of making data-driven decision when we have paltry long-term data about a virus that's called novel for a reason. It's new. All of it's disturbingly new. And no one wants to go trailblazing at the expense of maybe killing a kid.

Might that have happened? Hell if I know. Hell if anyone knows.

But you remember that day Jay Simpson collapsed at Nebraska, right? Then a few days later when he found out he'd essentially been taking his life in his hands every time he suited up? Scared ya, didn't it?

Well, for all we know, there could have been 50 Jay Simpsons on Big Ten football rosters at the moment, and all it takes is one.

The one thing you could not do here is kill somebody.

And that says nothing of the very real concerns among those who know way more about this stuff than you and I about potential long-term neurological and pulmonary issues in those who've recovered from COVID-19. This never should have been viewed as an issue of who's most and least likely to die from this. It always should have been about doing everything in one's power to keep the virus peeking in the window, but remaining outside of it. And there was never any guarantee that would be enough.

There's no doubt in my mind schools did their best here. They'd have been ridiculously foolish not to, and still, the plug got pulled.

Look, the execution of this was not the Big Ten's finest hour, but this was a bold maneuver, to get out in front of this and act as decisively and swiftly as it did. Right or wrong, who knows? We may never know. We'll see how it goes for all these other conferences Nebraska may or may not be passing notes to in the hall.

I'd have thought that pushing the season back, then calling a moratorium on practices — if there's too much concern to play, you can't justify allowing practice to go on, right? — would have made sense. It would have given everybody time to take a few deep breaths and maybe assess further protocols that could have been considered, though there does come a point in time where your carrying capacity gets hit.

At the very least, you could have managed procedure better and not come off as the league who announced a schedule a one day, then ripped it up the next. It might have allowed time to build more consensus, ease tensions and not have to endure a 24-hour span that looked something like the final standoff scene in "Reservoir Dogs." But once the leaks started, there was no closing the faucet.

I always figured football, and the smart people running It, would find a way. Never underestimate a money-making enterprise's ability to make money, no matter what, I said. Maybe I was naive. Or maybe I was right, and maybe this was doable, and the Big Ten (and Pac-12) cut bait too quick.

I don't know, but I do believe in action, and if you think that these men and women in charge here who made this call walked away from hundreds of millions dollars without there being some Goliath of a worry in that room (err, digital meeting room, that is), then you're fooling yourself. It's just an embarrassment that five conferences are acting in silos here, adhering to only their own standards, listening to only their own people. If anything should come from this, it needs to be a commissioner for the Power Five conferences. What if the Big Ten's medical people know more than the Big 12's, which they very well may? This is not a coordinated effort, so those gaps can exist. If there's anything I know about our world these days, it's that people believe what they want to believe, and that can be dangerous in times like these.

No one wanted this outcome. This is an economic issue, as I've always argued regarding football's importance. But this has always been an ethical issue, too. It's way easier to assume risk when the risk is not your own, and part of leadership sometimes is protecting people from themselves. Players want to play, no matter what. Players may or may not even know what they'd have been getting into here. None of us can say for absolute certain what they'd have been getting into here.

I've never covered a story where my opinion on the story has changed more than I have this one, and I say that as someone who has always viewed this virus dead seriously and feared the unknown even more than the known.

But my opinion never wavered off believing in football and its importance.

Maybe this could have worked for the Big Ten. I don't know if it made the right call or not. I respect anyone's conviction when they forsake gobs of money in the name of young peoples' well-being and I've never been quick to second-guess people for making hard decisions in the name of what they feel is right and responsible, in the face of a firestorm no less.

I don't know who's right and who's wrong here, and I don't know if either can even be defined.

I just know that I'm heartened by the fact that a bold, but unpopular, move was made in the name of player safety, but disheartened that that move had to come at the expense of football for so many people, the actual players themselves included. They must now be watched over, because football, for so many, is their structure, their identity, their life. At every school that doesn't play football in the next few months, peoples' lives will be affected. I can only assume salaries will be cut, jobs will be lost, businesses will suffer, rippling all throughout the vast college athletics complex, lifequake-type stuff for a lot of people.

This sucks.

Again, I don't know who's right and wrong here, and I don't know if anyone's right or wrong, but that's the point of so much of this Corona Life we're all subject to: We don't know.

We still don't know.

What I do know is that while a lot has happened to bring us to this point, one thing is inarguable: This is that damn viruses' fault. To hell with that damn virus.

Yesterday sucked, the day the music died, so to speak, as it pertains to college football, but as they say, this too shall pass, and it will. Whether that comes in the form of a tweaked college basketball season, a one-of-its-kind spring football season or something more distant, normalcy will return, and think of how much more fun it will be when it does.

That's my outlook anyway.

There were no sports of any kind for months, and I remember enjoying the NFL draft more than I ever thought I could. Then, I don't think I'd ever looked forward to a baseball game more than I did that Yankees-Nationals game in D.C., and of course it got cut short by rain.

Anyway, speaking of baseball, Fox is doing this asinine thing where it's superimposing in these pixel people in the stands. It's awful.

Why are we pretending things are normal? They're not normal. We might not even recognize normal next time we see it.

Embrace the abnormality.

Spring football, as much as you have to suspend disbelief to grasp the concept, sounds like fun. People like spring games, right? Now these would be spring games. I have no Idea how it would work, or whether it will work, and I very much share your concerns about the calendar, but If they can play six to eight games in the spring, then maybe delay next season, hey, worth a shot, right?

Let's do our part, let's cheer like hell for the good people working on that vaccine and hope like hell their aim is pure and let's enjoy whatever comes next, whenever it comes and whatever it looks like when we see it.

Now, who's with me?!

There's not gonna be any football any time soon.

But I'll tell you this: We're not going anywhere.

Things may be unconventional right, as they've been for months, but my promise to you Is that we're still gonna do everything in our power to be informative, interesting, entertaining, whatever you need. We're gonna cover the hell out of basketball, we're gonna cover the hell out of basketball and football recruiting and whatever comes next for football, we're gonna cover the hell out of that, too. We'll have our columns and chats and conversations same as always.

You don't owe us anything, but so many of you have been so good to for so long, we owe you that.

Membership Info: Sign up for GoldandBlack.com now | Why join? | Questions?

Follow GoldandBlack.com: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

More: Gold and Black Illustrated/Gold and Black Express | Subscribe to our podcast

Copyright, Boilers, Inc. 2020. All Rights Reserved. Reproducing or using editorial or graphical content, in whole or in part, without permission, is strictly prohibited.