Stop protesting the Big Ten's decision to postpone football, fall sports
On the latest edition of the Yahoo Sports College Football podcast, Dan Wetzel, Pat Forde and Pete Thamel discuss people protesting the Big Ten's decision to postpone football, including how the conference handled the entire situation.
Video Transcript
DAN WETZEL: We recommended that the Big Ten try to explain itself in some kind of a fashion. They finally did because they were getting absolutely roasted everywhere. I don't know that this is really gonna cut things down. But obviously you had Kevin Warren come out and say we will not revisit the vote. Didn't want to give details to a vote, was there a vote, all this.
But that should end the kind of just outrageous stories that half the league was still gonna play a season and all of that. That was never happening. They did kind of explain their rationale. They're worried about a number of different things, which I think we've always been saying. And they would've saved themselves a lot of grief, I think, if they had done that previously, but they didn't.
PAT FORDE: At this point, it's over, and I would love for everybody in the Big Ten to stop complaining. My god, the fans there are turning this into this incredible social injustice. And I am sick to death, quite frankly, of the complaining about it. There is a pandemic going on, man. There's a lot of bad stuff happening out there.
Stuff is getting canceled, postponed, rescheduled left and right in every element of our lives, football included. Sorry, football is not immune to this. It's 40% of the FBS. It is most of division one if you count FCS. And, quite frankly, I think it's a perfectly defensible position.
You want to try to play? Fine. You don't want to try to play? Fine. And I can understand being disappointed, but the level of anger and the misplaced rationalizations that have gone into trying to justify why people are still angry is amazing to me.
The economy of our town is ruined. Guess what, the economy of your town was already ruined. Your five-game home schedule in front of 20% of the fanbase is not gonna make everything fine, all right? So you're not saving the economy with a fall schedule. I am over it.
PETE THAMEL: Nobody should've been surprised or shocked or whatever. A lot of this outrage has been manufactured through a myopic perspective. The Big Ten for six weeks stood outside in bright orange clothes, waved their arms, and said, we're very concerned about a season. This is a day-to-day situation. There may not be a season. We don't even want our players to put on pads and go in contact because we don't feel like that's safe, all right?
So I feel like they did everything right to prepare their constituents to get to the point. And from the Friday night to the Tuesday they announced it, it was really poorly handled internally, communicated poorly internally, and then the public messaging was an abject failure. And the biggest failure of it was the eight days it took to clean things up. This could have been a maybe 48-hour dust-up, and they just allowed it to become this searing, crazy mess.
Warren said if he could do one thing over, he would have everyone together, explain it all, have the medical people answer the questions of the presidents. Because things got muddled along the way. And look, it's a tough time to be a rookie commissioner. Pandemic, unprecedented stakes, the whole thing. You can understand why Kevin Warren didn't have his mind wrapped around the complications of the job.
And I felt like Wednesday he acknowledged his failure to execute in a lot of ways and wisely, as Pat said, tried to push things forward. And they should not rush what they're going to do in the winter slash spring. But also I think the inertia that came with their poor messaging of the decision has slowed down the process of putting together a schedule.
