Tonight is going to be the start of a weird football season, one which has already seen practices turned upside down and schedules thrown out the window less than a month before the season. No spectators. No hot dogs. Blah, blah, blah. At this point in 2020 it takes something wildly unexpected to shock me, but something will shock me tonight.
When the kicker puts foot to ball to start the game at Marysville it will conclude a series of events that I find unfathomable – even under the cloud of COVID.
There is no way this high school season should be happening. As unfair as it is to every high school athlete involved, the season should have been canceled. If things in the corona-world are as dire as we have been told, to carry on with a football season right now is pretty much a joke.
Please understand, I want a season. I am a football guy. Nothing beats Friday night lights bleeding into a long slate of college games on Saturday and wrapping up with an easy Sunday channel gliding from one pro game to the next. I played under a slightly more yellow version of those lights at Marysville. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted to having my senior season canceled.
But anyone who played high school football will tell you, it’s gross in the trenches. Every lineman’s facemask is spackled with dried slobber. You spit on the ground when your mouth gets full of gunk because you are gasping for breath. You clean out your nose as well, despite a lack of tissues. You put your mouthpiece in and out constantly and then put those Purell-free hands on everyone else as part of the game. You yell and cough and snort into the face of the guy across from you, sometime at a distance of six inches or less.
But….
We can’t shake hands at the coin flip.
We can’t let every member of the team dress for the game.
We can’t serve certain foods in the concession stand.
We can’t sit in the outdoor stadium, regardless of proximity to others, without a mask.
We can’t even have all members of players’ families at the game.
Let’s put aside our love for football for a moment and be honest about the game. It is a monsoon of the very types of behaviors shot-calling officials have been warning us about for five months. Distance, contact, killer breath droplets, hands in mouths. It’s all there as part of the grime and grit of the game.
When I played I would not have thought twice about reaching down into the grass and picking up another player’s mouthpiece, but in the real world right now I’m supposed to be afraid of a gas pump. Get out of here. You can’t tell me death hides on every shopping cart handle and then say it is OK for young men spend two hours in a petri dish with uprights.
And what has been the point of travel restrictions? I understood that such mandates were in place to make it more difficult to spread the virus from one population to another. School populations are immune to this? Let’s say Hilliard has an outbreak late next week. Players from Hilliard Darby spread the virus to a handful of Monarchs at next Friday’s game. The two weeks after that Marysville plays Dublin Jerome and then Thomas Worthington, depositing some cases along the way. Now an outbreak that was only rampant in Hilliard has moved to Marysville, Dublin and Worthington because the gridiron is a crockpot of filth.
I think it all came together for me when I saw a photo on our front page last week from Triad of a very young girl riding a bus with yellow bows in her hair, wide eyes and a big pink mask over her mouth. This state, and in fact this nation, has had to go through months of imposed hardships that cost many citizens liberties, opportunities and financial security.
But for an abbreviated high school football season, we act like none of that happened?
There are restaurants in this state receiving citations from undercover liquor agents because people are standing rather than sitting at table, but 22 boys slamming into each other is fine.
Grandparents have died, isolated, in nursing homes for the sake of safety, but it’s fine on Friday night for a pile of boys from two different towns to breath each other’s air while piling on a fumble.
There is only one conclusion to make from all this, if it’s safe to play high school football things must be fine on the virus front. There shouldn’t be one restriction on any business if the games go off tonight. If the season kicks off tonight, distancing and mask guidelines in classrooms are clearly unnecessary.
I don’t blame the schools because they are operating under the guidelines they have been handed. But those pulling the strings in the state government and in the OHSAA are sending out some serious mixed messages.
I honestly can’t believe it’s happening, so much so that it is going to cost me money. I shot my mouth off during a staff meeting a month ago, saying that there was no conceivable way a football season could be played. “Never say never,” I was told.
I was supremely confident. “If there is a high school football season this year, I’ll buy pizza for lunch on the first Friday.”
I need to wrap this up so I can find out if they want pan or thin crust?
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.