Rakes Report #146: To believe in this living is just a hard way to go
~optional musical accompaniment~ ~alternate version~
Hey friends,
I originally intended to start this edition with a look at the Fighting Irish’s performance in big games and how we qualify what counts as “big” because it would allow me to do a couple of my favorite things, mainly talking about old college football games and spinning alternate histories. After that I was going to include a brief note on where my head is at regarding the possibility of college football during a pandemic but I started writing that section first and it got so long that it would have felt tonally incongruent to precede it with a meditation on 2018 Stanford.
So, random football talk will return in the next edition and if you want to just wait for that no harm, no foul — please be safe and smart and take care of yourself in the meantime — but this is an attempt from someone who loves college football as much as anything in this world grappling with the fact the thought of it at the moment is kind of actively bumming him out.
For the first time since I started following college football, I am not bubbling over with excitement for the upcoming season. Normally as we enter July I am consuming every bit of available information for both the Irish and the national scene, starting to sketch out plans for preview newsletters and podcasts and trips to games. But at the moment? I am trying to gin up some internal enthusiasm but continually falling flat, occasionally even bumping into dread. Talking to some normally fervent friends I don’t believe I am alone in this ennui but I wanted to attempt to walk through these feelings in case anyone was feeling similarly and a discussion might prove helpful.
As best I can tell, there are three outcomes for how this season goes, and only one of them is good. That would look something like cases declining drastically over the next two months with an increase in testing and contact-tracing and continued great work by medical professionals in lowering the death rate. The country as a whole would be in a better place with declining case and death totals while outbreaks in locker rooms or on campuses would be the exception, not the rule, as a mostly normal season happens but probably without full crowds.
The other two results are far grimmer and, for the moment, seem likelier. Option One is basically that the season makes it a few weeks or a couple months before it’s forced to shut down because too many teams and too many schools and too many states are overwhelmed by the virus. Things have sort of been in a quasi-stasis for so long that it can be easy to forget how quickly these things can go: On March 10, March Madness was set to occur as normal. On March 11, the NCAA announced there would be no fans in the stands but still games. On March 12, the entire tournament was canceled.
The state of Texas had a mini version of this recently: On June 19, it allowed its amusement parks to reopen in their latest attempt at returning to normalcy. On June 25, it paused the reopen and one day later began rolling it back as cases continued to climb. The University of Arizona just shut down the return of athletes to campus on Tuesday due to spiking cases. The NBA’s plan to set up a centralized bubble is still wobbly, even with way fewer teams and way smaller rosters. You’re telling me that once students are back on campus that locker rooms are going to stay safe? I say this with both affection and experience, but the sense of invincibility felt by college students can make them occasionally act quite stupid, and all it takes is the fourth-string walk-on’s roommate to slip up and you could be toast. Getting excited and doing all the preview stuff only to have things shut down in late September would feel awful.
(This is setting aside the issue of whether colleges are even going to be able to remain open for in-person studies for the entire fall. If they shut down, it is a non-starter to send everyone else home because it’s too dangerous but keep unpaid athletes on campus to play football. Father Jenkins attempted to make the moral argument in a late May op-ed in the New York Times and I was among the many who did not find it particularly convincing to equate a semester of college on campus for the “future leaders of our society” to soldiers dying in war. Seems like Notre Dame is attempting to be safe with their plan but we’ll see what happens when dorms are at full capacity and college students start doing college student things.)
Option Two might be worse: Due to the financial pressures of playing the season, schools just plow through the best they can regardless of what’s happening in the communities around them. Every week you’ll have reports trickling out of positive tests followed by forfeitures or no contests and each kickoff will be accompanied by last-minute revelations of which players won’t be participating. The stadiums will only be partially full if there’s anyone in them at all, resulting in a soulless game-day experience that only those of us who have years of training consuming weeknight MACtion and bottom-tier bowls will be able to stomach. Speaking of bowls, there might not even be any, save maybe a playoff.
All of those annoyances are minor compared to the fact that while the season limps on the overall situation would be similar or worse to what it is now and we’d have to try and force ourselves to enjoy the season amid reports of rising cases and filling hospitals and obituary after obituary. As Americans we are pretty adept at taking unnecessary death and folding it into our everyday life, whether it’s from gun violence or endless war or a patchwork health care system that puts profit over care, but I hope we have not normalized the loss of hundreds of Americans every single day by autumn should that still be occurring. It’s true that the death rate seems to be dropping and a recent study out of Italy was very promising but unless your death rate is zero if the denominator continues ballooning exponentially that is still a tragedy. Part of the fun of college football is over-investing in the results and I think that might be difficult to do if there is a 9/11 worth of fatalities every single week.
So, I don’t know – I hope I am just being pessimistic and that these next two months are better than the previous three, and that all the precautions teams not named Clemson are taking work and that those who are college-aged and contract the virus really do recover quickly and suffer no long-term health consequences and that antibodies actually stick. I hope it does not spread to vulnerable university employees or into the towns and cities that surround these schools and that we don’t have the solemn announcement of losing a member of the Notre Dame community or finding that the campus reopening was responsible for an outbreak in South Bend.
As far as the Report, as long as there is a Fighting Irish football game there will be a newsletter in your inbox the following Monday morning. I will absolutely be dragging Jamie onto the podcast to introduce you to all the incoming freshmen and there will be other preview content, but perhaps not as much as usual. Who knows – maybe by August the preseason will feel something like normal followed by a season that feels the same and this whole conversation will seem silly, but honesty is the best policy and I wanted you to know where my head was as of today.
While we’re being serious, I just wanted to say how incredibly cool and equally surprising it was to see Notre Dame hold a Juneteenth rally in which the head coach of the football team repeatedly expressed his support for Black Lives Matter and dropped to a knee with a raised fist next to the Black leaders on his team. I think the football program has done a tremendous job of supporting and promoting the voices of Black players during this period, whether it’s Daelin Hayes or Braden Lenzy or Litchfield Ajavon or walk-on Max Siegel. Jack Swabrick was in attendance, as were Mike Brey, Niele Ivey, many of the football assistants and coaches from across the other sports.
Father Jenkins was also there, which is good, but a few days later he published an open letter updating next steps, which was meh-to-bad. If you have spent time at Notre Dame before you have probably noticed it is rather white and a Black Alumni group has spearheaded a petition with a number of very sensible and necessary suggested changes. That link also contains testimony from students of color about the racism, implicit and explicit, they have to deal with on campus which I encourage you to read. (For a rundown of the situation, I thought this was a phenomenal piece by our friend Andrew Smith at Notre Dame Our Blogger.)
The worst thing about the letter was that it said the university was giving “serious consideration” to items such as “Increase the number of Black students, other students of color and students from under-resourced communities,” “Create a culture that is intolerant of discrimination and racism and increase transparency regarding the administration’s response to racist or discriminatory incidents” and “All students—and particularly majority students—should support an inclusive environment by educating themselves, avoiding racist remarks or actions and calling out others when they make such remarks or do such actions.”
What in the world do you have to consider about any of those? Let alone some of the other suggestions like “Increase the number of Black faculty and staff” and “Enhance health care and counseling services for underrepresented students” which all seem like completely no-brainer changes. I am glad the university understands that it cannot just post the photo of Hesburgh and MLK and call it a job well done but just say you’re going to do this stuff, that you’re working on the specific details and that you’ll be engaging members of the Notre Dame family about the best steps to continue taking as the long process continues.
I love Notre Dame and want it to be better so I hope that it is explained to any old guard who think things are fine as they are because the checks keep cashing and the development keeps booming around campus that the status quo is not acceptable. It will be important to maintain pressure going forward because a few cosmetic changes and lip service are not enough. The athletic department can only do so much and major systemic change has to come from the administration, so here is hoping the next letter is much improved.
A bit of bookkeeping before I let you go, as there have been a few more podcasts since the last edition. In reverse chronological order:
* The South Bend Tribune’s Carter Karels on Notre Dame’s plan to return amid COVID-19, how the athletic department is empowering athletes, Jordan Johnson, Mike Mickens, Kyle Hamilton and potential defensive breakouts.
* Irish basketball great Brianna Turner discussed the protests that have followed George Floyd’s death. Bri has been extremely outspoken on the changes that need to happen and brings the perspective of having two parents who work in law enforcement so I encourage you to seek out her thoughts on the myriad platforms on which she’s published them in addition to the Report.
* Jessica Smetana, Paul Rigney and I took a deep dive into the UFO sighting at the 2011 South Florida game and the history of UFO culture in the United States.
* A rewatch of the 2010 Utah game, aka Tommy Rees’ first career start and a game that ended a bunch of Weis Era losing streaks.
You can listen to those on Spotify or Apple or LibSyn.
Also, on a quick merch note, I have received my Throw The Damn Ball shirts (a green on heather and a gold on navy) and I can confirm they are very cool in real life if you were skeptical about how they would turn out. Thanks again to Bridget for her great work.
I think that’s it? Sorry this was heavier than usual but if you made it this far I appreciate it. Go Irish and until next time, please take care of yourself and each other.