Tom Brady and Nick Saban currently sit atop their respective football kingdoms, looking down once again upon the hapless mortals who so often try but rarely succeed in toppling them from their perch.
If you phrase it like that the 2020 football season sounds like it might have been normal. Sure, we had the usual twists and turns along the way. The Buccaneers lost to the Bears! It was a disaster! Meanwhile Alabama…. Well, they didn’t really break a sweat against anyone. But it’s college football so you never know.
In a way, Saban and Brady’s continued success in a pandemic-stricken year shows just how inevitable the duo truly is. The world burned around them. Their teams dealt with everything from having to pour obscene amounts of resources into safety protocols to last minute schedule changes. None of it mattered. They plodded along to their respective championship games and caved the opposition’s head in.
Those two championship games were perfect microcosms of just how surreal this season was. Fresh off a throttling of Clemson, the Ohio State Buckeyes were missing three crucial starters for their National Championship matchup with the Crimson Tide. If you took a quick stroll to Alabama’s sideline you could see Jaylen Waddle who was playing in his first game back from an ankle injury that was so bad he was in an ambulance before the quarter even ended.
All of that looked like the plot of a low-budget, inspirational sports movie compared to what was going on at Super Bowl XLV. The NFL is always one to grasp at some good PR so they continuously highlighted how out of the 25 thousand fans in attendance, 7 thousand of them were vaccinated healthcare workers. The strength of these workers was repeatedly lauded without a trace of irony even as we crept closer to half a million COVID-related deaths and both teams playing had allowed fans all season.
If anything, the insistence on playing this year helped pull back the curtain and completely expose the major problems that even casual football fans know exist. But you know what? In a weird, totally ass-backward way, I’m thankful this season happened.
Things looked pretty hopeless for sports at the start of the pandemic but when they did finally roar back, it was with a calming air of normalcy. “Oh, I can get pissed about the Buffalo Bills defensive line issues instead of trying to stave off my anxiety about the pandemic and my future? Sign me up!” For two afternoons every week I was able to sit on my couch and watch silly little games before going back to staring at the same four walls I’ve looked at since last March.
Sure, the rollout had plenty of flaws. There were all the issues I mentioned at the start of this post. Pretty much everything about how the NCAA approached the virus made next to no sense. Then you had icky moments like the NFL trying to hype the nation up with a weird Vince Lombardi lookalike (was he CGI? was he an actor? I don’t know and I’m not going to look it up because I’m too afraid of seeing it again.) But that connection back to something regularly scheduled, something that was the norm even in years past? It was priceless.
Hopefully this will be the only year we have to deal with all of this. Vaccination numbers in the United States are growing rapidly and once it’s widespread enough, we can go back to wringing our hands over the usual questions. Like, whether or not it's ok to love a sport that is essentially a repackaged gladiator fight.
We should be able to be back in the stands this fall. In the meantime, I’ll have to find ways to occupy myself. Sure, baseball, basketball, and hockey are around but it’s just not the same. Maybe I’ll finally finish reading War and Peace. I might get around to learning how to ride a bike. Whatever I decide to do, I’m glad sports helped me procrastinate doing it until now.