Four-and-a-half months ago, the world got cancelled. On the night of March 11th, Mitchell Forde had checked into a Nashville hotel to cover Mizzou in the SEC men's basketball tournament for us. That night, Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for COVID-19 and the sports world came to a stop.
Over the next few days, everything that was supposed to happen didn't happen. And everyone who does what I do got the same question: If there are no sports to write about, what are you going to write about?
Like most of you, I kind of thought this was going to be a temporary stoppage. I knew basketball season was over and I figured spring football wasn't going to happen, but we could figure out how to navigate our way through three weeks or so without sports and then May and June were the slow time of year every year and by the time July rolled around we were going to get ready for SEC Media Days and college football season. Like the rest of you, in mid-March, when I saw people saying the football season might be in jeopardy I scoffed and thought "If we haven't figured out how to have sports by the end of the summer, we've got a whole lot bigger problems than I thought."
Well, here we are.
Missouri is supposed to start fall camp next Friday. I'm relatively confident that will happen. We won't be able to see it and we don't really know if those practices will be in preparation for an actual season, but I think the practices are at least going to happen. And we'll get to talk to some of the coaches and a handful of players on Zoom and we'll manage to cobble together some stories where they talk about what's going on at the practices we can't see and they tell us they're preparing as if there is going to be a season that starts on September 5th until someone tells them it doesn't.
But as August begins, I'm thinking more and more about that question I thought was kind of ridiculous a few months ago. When there are no sports, what do you write about?
I sat here pondering that question for about an hour before I started typing anything. See, we have businesses that have paid us to sponsor our stories and so we need to write those stories because that was the plan when they agreed to become sponsors. We can't really write too much about the football team because it has a new coach and we saw about 40 minutes of one practice in pads and, well, we don't know anything. We can't really write about the season because, well, we don't know if it's going to happen and if it happens, we don't know who they're going to play or when or where they're going to play them. We can't really write about anything else because without football, the rest of it doesn't happen. So what do we write about?
I decided maybe I'd just write about what was on my mind. Maybe I'd be honest with those of you who still care enough to read what I think.
This is going to be a little too inside baseball (or inside my head) for some of you. Those of you that pay to read our stories (I mean this sincerely, thanks for continuing to do that when there haven't been any sports for almost five months and we don't really know the next time there will be sports) do so because you are sports fans. You want to read about your team and the players on your team and how what they're doing now impacts their future. But we can't really write about any of that right now.
So it's put people who do what I do (you can call us sportswriters or media or journalists or hacks or bloggers; all of those are much nicer than many of the things many people are calling us these days) in kind of a weird position. We really have two choices: We can write a whole bunch of stuff about the practices that are supposed to start in eight days and the season that's supposed to start in five weeks and pretend everything is normal and is going to happen until someone tells us it isn't going to happen. There's nothing really wrong with doing that. I'm sure there are a lot of you reading this who want us to do that. I've got a hard time doing it. We can also write a whole bunch of speculative stuff. What's this mean and what's that mean and will there be a season or won't there be and why or why not? We've done a pretty fair amount of that and all it does is lead to arguments. (For the record, reading some of the stuff that's been written, I really do understand how you would think that there are people in our business who are rooting for college sports not to happen. I don't think they actually ARE rooting for that, but I understand how you could think it).
Those arguments are easy to get sucked into. God knows I've gotten sucked into some in the last four months. I think we probably all have. It's easy to do when you're not really going anywhere and not really doing anything and your job is to write and talk about things that aren't happening. I saw a tweet from a fellow college sports reporter that made me think and in some ways led to me writing this.
Man I want to feel that way again.
For four and a half months, my world has been my house and taking walks around the neighborhood and watching a whole lot of Amazon and Netflix with my wife and kid and reading the Internet. A whole lot of reading the Internet.
This might be something that someone in my line of work shouldn't say, but the Internet can be a hell of a toxic place. To be fair, that's probably not a new development. But when we have sports, man it can be fun. I've made good friends through our message board. There are a ton of people, like Jason, who I've interacted with online quite a bit who I don't know, but I kind of feel like I know because we do the same thing and we talk about the same things. When games are happening, there's this whole community of people that are watching it at the same time as you are and reacting to it in real time. When Patrick Mahomes is leading the Chiefs back from another double digit playoff deficit, I don't have to preface a tweet with "So I'm watching the Chiefs game and..." Everybody knows what I'm talking about. They're watching it with me. It's like the world's largest sports bar.
But it's been 20 weeks since we've had that. And in that time, the Internet has just turned into the place where we all pretend we know everything and have all the answers and know what should happen and tell anybody who doesn't agree with us how much they suck. I'd be willing to bet there aren't a lot of jobs right now where people get told they suck more than in the media.
That's not meant to sound as whiny as it probably does. We still have jobs. They're really not hard jobs. It could be a whole lot worse. But it's not all that much fun. I deleted Facebook last week (pro tip: If you haven't done it, you should do it. There hasn't been a single second where I've been tempted to go over there and see what people I went to high school with and haven't talked to since graduation think about the virus or race relations or police or the President). I decided I'd disengage from Twitter and only tweet links to our stories (insert "This isn't an airport, you don't have to announce your departure" joke here). That hasn't been as hard as I thought it might be either.
I don't know if those are going to be permanent changes. I mean, at some point, when Mahomes and the Chiefs are on the way to their fourth straight Super Bowl title, it's probably going to cross my mind that "BY GOD PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW WHAT I THINK ABOUT THIS."
I hope I have to make that decision soon. Hell, I hope I have to decide if I should tweet about Missouri and Central Arkansas in September. I just want to argue about sports again. I want to share the games with people I don't know, get mad at decisions I don't understand and am not qualified to critique, cheer for laundry. More than anything, I want to have something to write about again.
The games--both those I watch for pleasure and those I watch for work--are going to come back. Sometime. God, I hope it's soon. I need them. We all do.
Until then, thanks for reading.
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