Portrait Of A Sports Fan During Corona
Overall, the absence of sports hasn’t affected me all that much. The NFL has been largely unaffected by this point outside the draft being held in basements. The Trail Blazers were having an injury-ridden garbage season that would be best forgotten. I still don’t really have a hockey team to root for, as I’m holding out to pledge allegiance to the Seattle team when they come in. As an Orioles fan, the less baseball I watch the better off I am. So outside missing the NBA/NHL playoffs, I’m pretty fine. I’ve also been bemoaning the amount of baseball games for ages, so the prospect of a shortened season rendering wins more valuable actually interests me.
Some of my friends and colleagues have not been taking it as well. This baseball loving friend in particular has been offering regular updates on him trying to grow grass in his backyard. I’m worried about him. Marcus, please seek help.
The longer this goes on the more evident it becomes that even football is probably going to be affected. Sports will come back, probably next month, because too much money is wrapped up in this stuff to let the owners just walk it off. The players need their income too. But we could very well see an entire year of sports without crowds. Before you get your “Sounds like a typical (team with no fans) game” joke in there, we actually do have a single instance of this actually happening that we could look at for what it might be like. Pretty much everyone who witnessed it called it surreal. I would concur. It was weird. Sports without fans feels so….unceremonious. It looks like a practice. We will likely get our sports back, but they aren’t going to be the same sports experience, and I’m not sure a lot of the people calling for re-opening realize it.
As for each sport? I’m curious to see how things play out. Baseball will likely do okay. A shortened season will be fun and make every game more important. Baseball is also probably the least at-risk sport out of all of them. You can’t social distance in team sports much harder than baseball players do. I’m more at risk going for a walk than a center fielder is.
The NBA and NHL are the ones that are under the worst situation. They can’t finish the season out, but they also have to play some sort of playoff because I can’t see either league just straight cancelling the season and starting anew. That is honestly probably the best course of action, but fans would riot and the players would also hate it. Both sports feature far more contact than baseball, though hockey might be somewhat tolerable thanks to uniforms covering almost an entire body making skin contact difficult, especially if they add more to the facemasks. Neither sport can afford to wait much longer though, as the stoppage drags on it leaves less and less time for a proper offseason and may impact the beginning of the next season. I’ve heard rumblings of just taking teams at their current records, seeding them out, and playing a shortened playoff system to crown a winner. If they have to play more for the season, this isn’t the worst concept. It might not feel like a true championship, but I think we can all sort of forgive that right now.
The NFL needs to count their lucky stars they squeaked the super bowl in before everything went to shit, because football is a huge infection risk. Football works pretty well on TV so it won’t suffer the same way Baseball/Basketball/Hockey will without crowds, but so many people are involved during an average football game, a game explicitly starring human contact. All starters. All backups. All referees. All coaching staff. All medical personnel. All technical support folks like cameramen and sound guys. The many waterboys who squirt Gatorade into player mouths. Football is a disgusting petri dish of a sport.
And that’s honestly the biggest issue with all of them. It might work okay for a bit, but if any of these players become infected, most of the people involved in a game will become infected before a doctor catches it. Most players are in great health and probably won’t show many symptoms, then carry the bug back home to family members. If they take the steps required to properly quarantine the players between every engagement you have to wonder if this is even worth it, forcing these restrictions on people just so you can watch sports on your TV. The testing it would require to keep updated on the status of the players would take hundreds of tests away from the general public, who are already severely undeserved for testing and need it far more than JJ Watt does after a game. It feels like the people who are demanding shops re-open so they can make other people cut their hair, putting so many more at risk for vanity. It would be nice to get a haircut, it would be nice to watch sports, but it just isn’t essential to life. I had a distant family member die of the virus last month, and I’ve seen some friends much closer to me go through the worst of it. Please take this thing seriously.
Three people I cared about died since Sunday – my next door neighbour, my mother’s cousin and Coach Shula. Numptards in my area are doing the thick end of absolutely fuck all to slow the spread of the virus – they couldn’t give a shit about anyone else, as long as they get their booze and smokes in. My rage at their stupidity is almost tangible.
And now I just learned that this year’s London games are off. ‘Course they are – Miami was a designated home team.
It was only a matter of time, obviously. The NFL was pretty much the only thing left that had yet to cancel anything. I had MCM London lined up for the Critical Role crew coming over again, and the London Spitfire’s OWL Homestand in Birmingham – both of which are knackered because the venues are now fuckoff-huge hospitals. I’d even booked three straight weekends off (MCM, OWL, my birthday).
Nothing to travel for now this year other than work. Whereupon I risk my ass for non-distancing fuckwits hellbent on turning the aforementioned three people into five for the sake of a hot tub (#BasicNecessities). Yay.
in all seriousness i fuckin hear this
on a day to day basis im surrounded (in a relative sense, because im staying the fuck at home) by buttfucks who praise the “phased and balanced” reopening of states, apparently oblivious to the still increasing incidence rates
sports are nice but theyre not oxygen. covid, on the other hand, literally saps said oxygen. not a difficult choice to make
im very sorry for your losses
R.I.P. Coach Shula. I may have been born a little too late and just missed the Super Bowl years, but goddamn did I enjoy watching one of the absolute greats helm my team.
I’ve seen my share of footb… soccer games with no fans in the stadium (as punishment for “fans” causing incidents), and it’s always a weird experience, sort of a glorified practice.
However, one interesting side of those games is that quite often they work as a live, non-filtered version of Mic’d Up. You get to hear coaches instructing players, complaining about officiating (with a little cursing included), and at times you can even catch some soundbites from players and referees. Just like the games themselves, sometimes it’s very entertaining, sometimes it’s plain boring. It’s far from enough to offset the absence of fans, but it’s a different angle you don’t get on normal circunstances.
Dr. Niraj Sehgal, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, said during a recent presentation that the Chiefs’ comeback win may have been a “gift” for his city.
“People may not remember this that well, but Super Bowl weekend, in some ways, with apologies to the 49ers’ fans, the gift we may have been given was the 49ers losing,” Sehgal said in Zoom call the school shared on YouTube.
“If you think about what happened that weekend, had the 49ers won, and there were parades, and parties at that time, that may have had impact that I haven’t seen actually described.”
Sehgal is co-lead of UCSF’s COVID-19 command center, which was set up the same day Patrick Mahomes led the Chiefs’ comeback victory over the 49ers.
Yeah, I read that in WSJ to bro. Maybe choking is a symptom and Kyle Shanahan has corona though. You never know.
Don’t worry Dave, as an Orioles fan you’ve still already gotten some tragedy for the team this season. One thing I’m pissed off about is that the Dolans won’t get to see that they can pay Frankie Lindor $30M and still fill out a winning roster for another $90M, so he’s pretty much gone.
With 100% certainty, rather than 95% certainty I mean. I wasn’t under any illusions.
Football is the only sport I care about enough to watch, so I can’t speak to baseball, basketball, or hockey. But if this does go into the fall and football is impacted, I have a plan. Just have some faith and listen…
– EA creates a ginormous networked game of Madden for tv, and each real player is forced to play remotely from their home as themselves. If they can’t, a child/wife/cat can step in.
– They are all mic’d up, so the players who don’t know how to play video games will be able to swear and yell and be hilarious.
– When the nation sees what a giant @#(*@ it is, EA will be forced to actually IMPROVE things they’ve let slide in the game over the years, like everything.
Also, if we can find a way for murder hornets to catch covid and completely die from it, but in so doing their bodies disintegrate into powder, which gets caught by the wind and becomes a worldwide cure? That would be faaaabulous.
Lets take this one step further. The only thing every tv channel on Earth will play is this giant Madden shit show! And when the tournament isn’t being shown all the TV channels will instead play either pre game or post game coverage of some sort for it. “But what if people just stop watching Tv and just binge watch Netflix or something until the tournament is over?” Well that’s because of Step 2 of my idea. We have Netflix, Disney+, idk goddamn Hulu remove their entire catalog to only show this tournament. Hell let’s just implant screens into peoples eyeballs that are only able to show the tournament
The current state of Madden is why I prefer the old Williams/Midway High Impact Football coin-op. Hell, Eyeshield 21 on the Wii plays a more fun game than Madden.
Im a newer game guy myself. Like late 2000s early 2010s so like Maddens 08-12 which are good games
If there’s one positive takeaway about not having any sports, it would be summed up in this one comment I saw on a sports article: “The one positive thing about this pandemic is we aren’t being subjected to Joe Buck.” I did see somehow where he is doing play-by-play on quarantine fan submitted videos. If he starts doing play calls on grass. I’m blaming Marcus!
Today is the last day you might see Joe Buck on TV for a while because it’s the series finale of Brockmire and Joe Buck has done a number of actually entertaining cameos. If any of you aren’t watching/haven’t heard of it the show follows a disgraced baseball announcer as he tries to piece his life back together after a huge on air controversy. The humor is as disgusting as you’d expect from an uncensored show on IFC and Jim Brockmire is played by Hank Azaria of Simpsons face.
Highly recommended.
As a Chiefs fan, is it bad if I kinda DON’T want pro football back this fall?
Just hang out and be Super Bowl champs for another year without the stress of actual GAMES?
(And Brady gets another year older before his next playoff run…. bonus!)
That wouldn’t make me a bad person, would it?
Brady’s on the Bucs now. There’s no guarantee that he’ll see another playoff game before he retires.
I heard on the radio that the Korean Baseball league has started back up again. That might help your sports starved friend.
You’re sleeping on blade 14. Sure he’s not as tall as his bretheren, but his apical meristem is already branching out fruiting bodies and will bear seed sooner than the others. Just watch.
Would Miracle-Gro be considered a performance-enhancing substance here?