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I thought we were over all this stuff.

If Jose Bautista's home run and bat flip in the 2015 playoffs was the zenith of baseball's culture wars and "play the game the right way" zealots, it seemed we had come around on the issue. Starting in the 2018 postseason and continuing into 2019, MLB even ran an advertising campaign featuring Ken Griffey Jr. imploring to "Let the kids play."

Two incidents from Monday night, however, suggest that what might be termed an old-school belief retains a strong footprint in the game. In the eighth inning of the Padres-Rangers game, Fernando Tatis Jr. swung at a 3-0 cookie with a 10-3 lead and belted a grand slam off Rangers reliever Juan Nicasio. Tatis had missed a take sign, but the Rangers clearly didn't like the swing with the Padres holding such a big lead. Ian Gibaut, a pitcher with all of 24 career innings in the majors, replaced Nicasio and threw his first pitch behind Manny Machado's head.

Since he was a child, Fernando Tatis Jr. has lived to play. This year, the game needs him just as much as he needs it. Jeff Passan

"I didn't like it, personally," Rangers manager Chris Woodward said of Tatis' 3-0 swing. "But, like I said, the norms are being challenged on a daily basis. So just because I don't like it doesn't mean it's not right. I don't think we liked it as a group."

Meanwhile, in the Nationals-Braves game, Juan Soto clubbed a 445-foot ninth-inning home run off Braves reliever Will Smith to give the Nationals a 6-3 lead at the time (the Braves would rally to win in the bottom of the ninth). Soto admired his home run for a second or two -- certainly not as long as he has admired some of his other blasts -- and Smith then barked an expletive at Soto, which only led to an even slower trot around the bases.

Nationals manager Dave Martinez defended his young superstar after the game. "Will Smith said something to Soto that I didn't really appreciate," Martinez said. "So I just want to let him know, hey, it wasn't Juan who threw the ball. His job is to hit so just be quiet and get on the mound. You threw the pitch, make a better pitch."

As Buster Olney and I discussed on the Baseball Tonight podcast this morning, that's the bottom line here: Throw a better pitch. Just because you're down seven runs doesn't give you the right to throw a 3-0 fastball down the middle and expect an easy strike. Tatis' job is to beat you -- no matter the score, no matter the count. Soto's job is to beat you -- and if, god forbid, he has some fun in the process and you don't like it, take Martinez's advice.

Former Astros pitcher Collin McHugh, who opted out of playing in 2020, had a good tweet on Tatis' home run:

Tatis was conciliatory after the game. "I've been in this game since I was a kid," he said. "I know a lot of unwritten rules. I was kind of lost on this. Those experiences, you have to learn. Probably next time, I'll take a pitch."

As Woodward alluded to, however, those unwritten rules are changing. In 2019, players swung at a 3-0 pitch 11.1% of the time. As McHugh said, you'd better be aware of potential consequences if you throw a 3-0 pitch down the middle. Even when ahead by five or more runs, players swung at a 3-0 pitch 5.2% of the time. Those rates are nearly double from what they were in 2009, when players swung on 3-0 5.3% of the time and just 2.2% of the time when ahead by five-plus runs. The game evolves -- even if the unwritten rules sometimes don't.

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Former big league pitcher Ron Darling, now an analyst for the Mets and MLB Network, addressed the trouble with the unwritten rules on MLB Network and defended Tatis. "I'm old enough that I grew up in a game that a lot of older guys had all the power and they would tell you how to act, what to do, and you did what they told you to do because that's how it was," he said. "Unwritten rules only work if everyone knows the unwritten rules. By their very definition, nobody knows an unwritten rule, so what you have now is you're trying to make a decision that a 3-0 count in a seven-run game is off limits. I'm just not with that at all."

It is all kind of silly. If Tatis had crushed a first-pitch fastball or even a 2-0 fastball, nobody would raise an eyebrow. But because it was 3-0 he has somehow, what, destroyed the integrity of the game? Hurt Juan Nicasio's feelings? This isn't Little League. He's trying to compete, to drive in runs, to hit home runs. Sure, a seven-run lead with two innings to go is pretty safe, but you never know. The Giants just blew a five-run lead in the ninth inning the other night.

ESPN's Buster Olney leads the discussion of the latest news and notes around baseball with the game's top analysts. Listen

The argument might be that Tatis endangered his own teammate. That only gets back to the circle of beanball baseball. Gibaut may have endangered his teammates by throwing behind Machado. What if the Padres had retaliated by throwing at a Rangers hitter? As for Soto, obviously some of his antics at the plate rub opponents the wrong way -- the shuffle, the cup adjustments, the air of confidence that does admittedly border on cockiness. It's important to understand the cultural aspects here, however. Tatis and Soto are both Dominican, and Latin players often do play the game with more flair -- no different than, say, the Korea Baseball Organization, where bat flips are almost an artistic aspect of the game.

"He means nothing by what he does," Martinez said of Soto after Monday's game. "When he does his shuffle, it's just to get him to the next pitch. He doesn't do it to show anybody up, he doesn't do it -- when pitchers start acting the way they're acting, it does bother me. But he doesn't do anything back. He stands up there and he gets a good pitch to hit and he hits the ball really hard. That's what you're supposed to do."

That's what both Tatis and Soto have been doing. Both are just 21 years old and yet emerging alongside Mike Trout as two of the best hitters in the game and as generational-type players. Tatis is hitting .305/.383/.726 and leads the majors in home runs (11), RBIs (28), runs (22) and total bases (69). If the MVP vote were held today, he'd likely be the landslide winner. Soto missed the start of the season with a positive COVID test, but in his 12 games he's hitting an absurd .409/.490/.955 with seven home runs and more walks than strikeouts. When he debuted in 2018 at 19 with a .406 OBP, his approach and plate discipline led to Ted Williams comparisons. With this start, he's showing that's not a crazy proposition.

So, yes, let the kids play. Let them swing 3-0. Let them admire their home runs. And opponents had better get to used to it because they're going to hit a lot more of them.

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Fernando Tatis Jr. and Juan Soto are breaking baseball's unwritten rules. Isn't it great? - ESPN

The Republican National Conventions speaker lineup is the sign of a party that knows itself well: First theres Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director who had a very lucrative anti-abortion epiphany and has since created an entire persona and career as a repentant abortion convert. Then theres Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the gun-toting couple from Missouri who were charged for threatening peaceful police brutality protestors with their firearms. Theres also Nick Sandmann, the teen from the 2019 viral video in which he and a group of fellow students from Covington Catholic High School stood smirking in front of Omaha elder Nathan Phillips as one of his classmates opined, Land gets stolen; thats how it works. Its the modern Republican Party, preserved in amber: Wealthy grievance warriors living the double mandate around top-down class war and white identity politics.

As it has since its national rise in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the Republican Party recognizes that the most effective and efficient way to galvanize its base is to consistently cast itself as a collective of aggrieved, put-upon, mostly white citizens. Sandmann, Johnson, and the McCloskeyseach the self-described victims of the out-of-control Communists running roughshod in our streets and in the halls of powerare the same basic blueprint. Republicans, a collective in desperate need of proving that its bedrock of imagined white grievance will be maintained and emboldened by a dwindling number of young conservatives, know what it has been, what it is, and what it needs to be to survive enough to keep those tax cuts and corporate giveaways flowing.

On Wednesday, my colleague Alex Pareene, writing on the rise of Madison Cawthorns brand of Nazi-cozy conservatives, made the assessment that the Republican Party, right now, is recruiting its future leaders from a pool of people attracted to the furthest fringes of far-right thought simply because those are the only young people currently interested in being associated with organized Republican Party politics under Donald Trump. The party has chosen this tactic because it recognizes that it is standing on wet sand, ideologically speaking. A quarter of the conservative base is already on board with single-payer health care, with roughly 63 percent of all voters leaning toward universal health care. A majority of all registered voters approve of the statewide mask mandates that just a few months ago were the target of the rights inane, self-defeating culture wars. On police reform, the country is in wide agreement that chokeholds, no-knock warrants, qualified immunity, local police militarization, and inaction by police witnessing abuse by fellow officers all need to go. Two-thirds of the countrys voters believe that the federal government is currently doing too little to combat climate change. This isnt a country of radicals. Many of these changes are the lowest possible bars of a democratic society and, at least on climate change, one that wants to stave off mass extinction.

There is no unwinding any of this, not by the current champions the Republican Party has dealt itself. So instead, it dedicated the last decade to perfecting minority rule. Right-leaning state legislaturesvoted in by a wave of reactionary racism responding to the election of Barack Obamagerrymandered state electoral maps so badly that, until the courts finally stepped in, winning was their only option. From there, they took on the Democratic Partys social agenda on a state level, enacting bans on abortion and gay marriage, drafting a political agenda of overt discrimination against transgender people, and stripping away any rights and protections that non-citizens previously held. Few of these measures were particularly popular on a statewide level and, in cases like that of North Carolinas anti-trans legislation, actually led to serious electoral losses.

The past three-and-a-half years under the Trump administration took this approach and applied it nationally, redirecting every major federal agency to work with only obedient political allies and industry cronies. Little of the subsequent horrors pursued and enacted by this administration has proven to be popular in a democratic sense. Then again, enacting the will of the people was never the end goal; it was power, by any and all means necessary.

Read more here:
The McCloskeys, Nick Sandmann, and the RNC's Carnival of White Grievance - The New Republic

Coming from a large family that gathered together regularly enough to tell stories, it was amazing how the Great Depression and World War II filled conversations.

They could remember going without birthday cakes for years because sugar was too expensive or rationed. Gas and oil and tires were rationed and they saved every drop of grease from their frying pans because the fat was donated to the war effort to make gun powder. A product of the 70s and 80s, I was amazed at how matter-of-factly they talked about what they endured.

In the 1,386 days of American involvement in World War II, 407,000 Americans lost their lives, an average of 294 a day. But fascism was threatening freedom and democracy on every continent, and by the time the decade around World War II ended, claiming 100 million lives, it would have taken an incredible unity of peoples and countries everywhere to stop fascisms evil. America came together, the world worked together, an enemy was defeated.

We have been counting COVID-19 deaths in the United States since March 2. More than 160,000 Americans have died of COVID in that time, or roughly 1,026 a day. This does not include the missed deaths and the unnecessary deaths from normal things that could have been treated except that the local medical community was overwhelmed or the clinics were forced to neglect normal health issues because their business model got butchered by the pandemic.

Our generations response to what is effectively our World War II moment? Culture wars, calling people of other political persuasions stupid and unpatriotic, religious nuts disregarding sound science, people claiming patriotic rights simply because they dont want to do something, government agencies suing other government agencies. By the way, a friend who said that he cannot wear a mask while grocery shopping because he feels as if it is choking him, wears a mask for eight hours at a time by himself in the woods as he tries to arrow a deer.

Almost all of those relatives and neighbors whose stories I listened to are dead and buried, and it is a good thing, too, because they would probably put all of us over their knees to light up our backsides. And wed deserve it.

During World War II churches covered their stained glass windows with blackout cloths because the government ordered it, but did they claim infringement on their rights? No. They knew they were doing their part to keep their community safe. They didnt light up their steeples because they were ordered not to. They quietly obeyed.

We are being asked to wear masks, stay farther than six feet apart and not sing, and religious people are crying about liberal government overreach. Are we being told we cannot worship? Are we being told what Bible we can read or what message we can preach? No.

We are being asked to slow the disease down by behavior that correlates with our best understanding about what best helps us fight this public health menace. That is all. Freedoms and rights are not being attacked. Life, at worst, is being inconvenienced, for the sake of public health. Something that Christians should have no problem with.

A gathering of over 2,000 young people was held on Butte des Mortes Lake in Winnebago County on the first day of Gov. Evers mask order. Hardly anyone was masked and no one was distanced and there was whooping and hollering and singing and drinking and back-slapping. It looked like fun, frankly.

Buttes des Mortes means hill of death, and I hope that is not a prophecy for some of the attendees, or for the attendees grandparents and vulnerable neighbors and co-workers. But I have to believe that in the choir loft of the Saints Triumphant there was a little head scratching as they said, We went without chocolate cake for four years and they cant take a year off from a beer bash? Our back sides should be beaten red, but instead we are telling each other to kiss them.

We are failing our World War II moment.

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Words to Live By: We're failing our World War II moment - Ashland Daily Press

Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty ImagesPresident Donald Trump and President of Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty Universitys commencement ceremony in Lynchburg, Virginia, May 13, 2017

Two weeks ago, Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, the largest evangelical college in America, posted an Instagram photo of himself on a yacht with his arm around a young woman whose midriff was bare and whose pants were unzipped. This would have been remarkable by itself, but it was all the more so because Falwells midriff was also bare and his pants also unzipped. In his hand, Falwell held a plastic cup of what he described winkingly in his caption as black water.

The aesthetics of the photo would be familiar to anyone whos ever been to a frat party, but they were jarringly out of place for the son of Moral Majority cofounder Jerry Falwell Sr. and a professional evangelical Christian whose public rhetoric is built on a scaffolding of sexual conservatism and an antagonism to physical pleasure more generally.

The backdrop of a yacht represents an entirely different hypocrisy, arguably a more egregious one: the embrace of materialism and the open accumulation of enormous wealth. Falwell, who has a net worth estimated to be more than $100 million, is not formally a prosperity gospel adherent, but he has nonetheless jettisoned those inconvenient parts of Christian theology that preach the virtues of living modestly and using wealth to help the less fortunate.

But for his public, the problem with the photo was the optics of carnal sinthe attractive young woman who was not his wife, the recreational drinking, the unzipped pantsnone of which would be acceptable at Liberty University, where coed dancing is penalized with a demerit. In the moral hierarchy of white evangelical Christianity, carnal sin is the worst, and this thinking drives the social conservatism that allows evangelicals to justify persecuting LGBTQ people, opposing sexual education in schools, distorting the very real problem of sex trafficking to punish sex workers, restricting access to abortion, eliminating contraception from employer-provided healthcare, and prosecuting culture wars against everything from medical marijuana to pop music. Evangelicalisms official morality treats all pleasure as inherently suspect, the more so when those pleasures might belong to women or people of color.

Fortunately for Falwell, evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web: the worst sins make for the best redemption stories. Even better, a fall from grace followed by a period of regret and repentance can be turned into a highly remunerative rehabilitation. That, in fact, has been many a traveling preachers grift from time immemorial.

I grew up hearing such testimonies, personal stories that articulate a life in sin and a coming to Jesus, firsthand. I was raised in the 1980s and 1990s in a family of Southern Baptists who viewed Episcopalians as raging liberals and Catholics, of which we knew precisely two, as an alien species. These were perfectly ordinary sentiments in the rural Alabama town we lived in. My dad was a local lineman for Alabama Power, and my mom worked at my school, first as a janitor and, later, as a lunch lady. Nobody in my family had gone to college.

Besides school and Little League, church was the primary basis of our social existence. As a child and into my early teens, my own religiosity was maybe a tick above average for our community. I went on mission trips to parts of the US that were more economically distressed than my hometown, handed out Chick tracts (named for the publisher and cartoonist Jack Chick) with as much zeal and sincerity as a twelve-year-old could muster, and on one occasion destroyed cassette tapes of my favorite bands (Nirvana, the Dead Kennedys, the Beastie Boys) in a fit of self-righteousness, only to re-buy them weeks later because, well, my faith had its limits.

All the while, I wasto use a word evangelicals like to misapply to any sort of secular educationindoctrinated by teachers, family, church staff, ministry organizations, and other members of the community to view everything I encountered in the world through an evangelical lens. If I went to the mall and lost my friends for a few minutes, I briefly suspected everyone had been raptured away except me, a particular brand of eschatological fantasy that we were taught was perpetually in danger of happening. Even my scandalous moments, which, do-goody overachiever that I was, were few and far between, were colored by the church. My first real kiss, at fourteen, was an epic make-out session on a sidewalk during a mission trip to a suburb of Orlando, with an eighteen-year-old assistant youth pastor named Matt.

I was ten or eleven when I was baptizedor in Southern Baptist parlance, born againand part of this process involved constructing my own redemption narrative: I lived in sin and would be saved by Christ. I recently rediscovered my own handwritten testimony on a visit to my moms house. In a childs rounded, looping handwriting, I had confessed that I used to cheat at games, something I dont remember doing at all. The likely explanation for this is that because sin is such an important prerequisite for redemption, my ten-year-old self had to fabricate one to conform to the required convention (never mind that such a falsification would be sinful itself).

And so I gave my life to Christ one Sunday during a regular church servicethough it was also common for people to do so during revivals, where itinerant preachers and musicians would visit and deliver proselytizing sermons. These evangelical ministers were indeed charismatic, polished from years of practice. They came bearing branded merchandise and a well-honed redemption story that almost invariably included a brush with carnal sin. The standard plot involved a nihilistic pursuit of pleasuregenerally, some combination of money, sex, and drugsas a reaction to spiritual bankruptcy that only endedwhen I hit rock bottom. But Jesus was there to pick me up, repair me with His love, and invest me with self-worth.

At the end of the sermon, congregants would be asked if they, too, would like to experience this kind of redemption. And many people did, tearfully but gratefully supplying their own testimonies of sin, emptiness, and regret. Its an effective story because who doesnt want to be rescued from their failures? Who doesnt want an opportunity to be forgiven and start over?

One of the more memorable itinerant evangelicals I heard was Rick Stanley, whose mother had married Elvis Presleys father, Vernon. In his telling, Stanleys experiences with carnal sin and untoward materialism were largely a function of being Elviss stepbrother, and as the sin part of the narrative went, it was certainly more salacious than cheating at games. I even bought a copy of Stanleys self-published memoir, The Touch of Two Kings. As adjacent-to-celebrity testimonies go, it was only outstripped in my memory by the visiting youth pastor who claimed to have almost converted Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor at a backstage party (which even then I assumed was news to Reznor).

I would expect, then, that Falwells fall is unlikely to be permanent. Indeed, Falwell has been forgiven by evangelicals before. Hes bragged about his penis size, and nailing his wife. There was the thing with the pool boy. According to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, there are lots more racy personal photosin clubs, at parties, on yachts. Until the world was forced to gaze at Falwells navel on Instagram, the reaction from the evangelical community was largely a shrug because men are allowed, even expected, to behave this way from time to time.

But judging from the demographic composition of the evangelical redemption circuit, this sort of reputational refashioning is uniquely accessible to white men. Unsurprisingly, there is no big traveling evangelical circuit for reformed female libertines. Men are readily forgiven, in particular, for sins of the flesh, whereas women are uniquely punished for them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the abortion debate, which is not really about abortion at all. If you take the rights claim about valuing lifea concern that seems rarely to extend to, say, the death penalty, or peoples access to affordable health carethe contradictions becomes clear. An antichoice movement that really valued life, on its own terms of reducing resort to abortion, ought to support two of the things most likely to prevent abortions: sex education and freely available contraception.

They dont, because the point is not to prevent abortion but to police sex. The religious right is invested in sexually controlling women, and one way to do that is to make the consequences for sex outside of marriage for women who do not want children, or who are not ready to have them, so dire and onerous that no one has sex outside of marriage. The message I got in abstinence programs as a teenager was that if I didnt want to run the risk of needing an abortion, I should keep my legs shut until marriage. Teenage boys are generally told to keep their pants on, in these programs, but are not shamed when, inevitably, they dont.

Purity culture thus dictates that sexuality belongs to men, that they are its custodians. Teenage girls do not own their sexuality; their fathers do. (Im grateful that my dad considers my sex life none of his business and always has, so I was never the recipient of a father-daughter purity ring, which, even at the height of my religiosity, I would have found creepy and inappropriate.) Even adult women do not own their sexuality; their husbands do. A Bible verse roughly translated as wives, submit to your husbands is routinely wielded to justify authoritarian marriages where the needs of women are never considered to be on a par with the needs of men.

This willingness to forgive powerful white men and allow them a standard that doesnt apply to others also benefits Donald Trump, who has shamelessly pandered to white evangelicals while garbling their theology and citing Two Corinthians rather than Second Corinthians. Trump supportersand I count some among my relativeshave used redemption theology to argue that Trump, despite what they generously refer to as his flaws, is a vessel for Gods work, simply because he endorses their biases and is willing to pantomime outrage over sins, carnal and otherwise, even as he personally continues to sin with impunity.

Trump also speaks to evangelicals resentments, the sense that they are a persecuted minority. In a pivotal early campaign speech at an evangelical church, a particular line stuck with the audience. I will tell you, he said. Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we dont want to talk about it.

Christianity is, of course, under no such thing. At least, not in America, where it is the majority religion and is so freely practiced that it permeates even parts of the USgovernment offices, public schools, courtroomswhere it ought to be barred by the Constitution. What white evangelicals perceive as under attack is a faux Christianity of manners, very often at odds with a Christianity that espouses justice. The redemption stories peddled by the evangelical right are never about a sinner who repents after a lifetime of exploiting renters as a landlord, after being horribly racist to black people or abusive toward women. The Christianity evangelicals care about disdains vulgarity more than it disdains injustice.

For now, Jerry Falwell Jr. is laying low. To execute the formula correctly, you need a period of contemplation and regret. And after that brief intermission, you can start selling tickets for the redemption tour.

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Jerry Falwell Jr. and the Evangelical Redemption Story - The New York Review of Books

WASHINGTON Football has frequently been compared to war, but rarely has that comparison been made as vividly as it was by former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz during a recent Fox News program. When they stormed Normandy, they knew that there were going to be casualties, there was gonna be risk, Holtz said, likening the prospect of playing college football in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic to the Allied invasion of France in 1944.

Even before the coronavirus, football had become a thoroughly politicized sport, too violent for some on the left and too woke for some on the right. But then came the pandemic, and President Trump saw an opportunity. Much as with wearing masks and reopening schools, Trump has turned playing football into yet another battle in the culture wars. Such battles often make reasoned debate difficult, but they do force nearly every American paying attention to choose a side.

And to Trump and his closest supporters, playing college football this fall is tantamount to driving the Germans back from Omaha Beach 76 years ago. Vice President Mike Pence said so himself, more or less, on Twitter. America needs College Football!, he wrote in an Aug. 10 post. He said it was important to our Nation but did not explain why.

College football can seem like an economic juggernaut, but that is more Saturday afternoon perception than anything else. In the Power Five conferences, where the very best teams are concentrated, football teams can generate revenue of between $50 million and $140 million per year, says Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist.

But, he says, virtually all of that goes back into football or other sports, with the overwhelming majority of schools actually losing money on athletics. College sports, in general, is not a money-making proposition, Zimbalist told Yahoo News. It doesnt feed the schools financially.

The University of Michigan, for example, made $127 million from its football team in 2018. Michigan also has $300.4 million of athletics-related debt. Further, since the school has an endowment that stood at $12.4 billion at the end of 2019, the football revenue figure is effectively insignificant, especially since Michigan reaped $500 million from returns on the investments it made on that endowment.

Story continues

Sports, of course, transcends economics, not to mention politics. But even at schools where football is immensely popular, health experts worry that now is not the time to resume play. Dr. Charlotte Baker is an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, whose Hokies have appeared in 33 bowl games and have spent a total of 304 weeks on the Associated Presss ranking of the nations top 25 teams. I understand that everyone wants football back, Baker told Yahoo News. But wanting is not enough. As a society, we dont have this under control enough.

The coronavirus does appear to spread much more easily in confined spaces, which would seem to argue in favor of a sport played on 57,600-square-foot expanses of open-air field. Outdoors is always safer than indoors, said Lydia Bourouiba, director of the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory at MIT. But, she said, close interactions even outdoors could pose a risk. Football is rife with such interactions, including huddles, dog piles and rows of linemen facing off mere inches away from each other.

Trump has downplayed such risks, arguing that football players are simply too fit to become sickened by the coronavirus. That argument lacks supporting evidence, but it does have an obvious political advantage. If there are players on the field come October, it will seem as if Trump is defeating the virus. Plus, many of the fans are likely to be potential Trump voters, since college football is one of the nations most Republican sports, along with golf and NASCAR.

Trump had previously tried to turn NASCARs rejection of Confederate iconography into a campaign issue, but that didnt get much traction. College football could be a more potent issue, since it is more directly tied to the reopening of academic institutions.

Trump and Pence have tweeted or spoken about college football many times in the last several weeks. Canceling the football season would be a tragic mistake, Trump believes. He has not deemed the cancellation of womens basketball or mens soccer seasons similarly tragic.

Like millions of sports fans across the nation, President Trump is eager to see college football return this fall, White House spokesperson Judd Deere told Yahoo News in response to questions about why the president was focusing on that sport. The fans want it and the coaches want it, but most importantly, the players want to play, and there are ways to do so safely.

The only problem with the Normandy analogy is that 4,414 Allied troops would die during the fighting on Frances beaches. Nobody is likely to countenance a number anywhere near that high to watch college football this fall, though the total number of fatalities from the pandemic across the nation is already 10 times the toll from Normandy (170,000 Americans have died from COVID-19).

College athletes are exceptionally fit, but fitness is not a guarantee of immunity. A freshman offensive lineman at Indiana recently went through 14 days of hell battling the horrible virus, as his mother put it. There are also the repercussions, about which nobody is yet certain because the coronavirus has not been around long enough for researchers to study it. Doctors worry that the coronavirus could subject athletes to a serious heart condition called myocarditis.

We do not know the long-term effects of this virus on young people, Dr. Ashish Jha, the newly appointed dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said. He is less worried about players on the field than all the other before-and-after activities associated with athletics. Youve got to go change clothes, youve got to go shower afterward, he said.

Bourouiba, the MIT fluid dynamics expert, said that in an ideal world, football players would receive rapid testing providing on-the-spot results on a daily basis. But such testing is not widely available. And some schools appear to be downplaying the role of testing. Florida States athletic director, David Coburn, recently revealed that football players are tested only on a weekly basis. He added that once the season began, players would probably be tested once every two weeks.

Thats not enough, Baker of Virginia Tech said of Florida States plan. A lot of things can happen in two weeks. Thats really not that great of an idea.

Some coaches recognize that not only could college football contribute to the viruss continued spread across the United States, their own players could be at risk for little-understood health effects like myocarditis. Id hate to be responsible for that, said Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens, who has been praised for making the sport safer by helping to create remote-control tackling dummies that reduce practice injuries.

Dartmouth Is the Blueprint for NFL Success in 2020. Yes, Dartmouth, read the headline of an Aug. 5 article in the Wall Street Journal. Except there wont be a football season at Dartmouth, or at any of the seven other Ivy League schools: The storied athletic conference became the first in the nation to cancel its football season on July 8. In fact, there will be no sports at all in the Ivies until January.

It was devastating, Teevens told Yahoo News. He offered that there might be a spring season, but he did not sound especially hopeful. And though he has been a leader in preventing injuries, the pandemic has stumped him much as it has stumped pretty much everyone else.

Theres just no easy answers, Teevens conceded. Few would disagree.

Nowhere is that more true than across the South and the Sun Belt, where the coronavirus has been killing hundreds of people per day for months on end. Those are the very states where football is most likely to return, and where that return is bound to make an already bad situation even worse. You're asking a hot spot state to continue having hot spot status, Baker said.

Some governors insist on college football regardless, a mentality that Florida State professor Diane Roberts has compared to Confederate bravado. As with the faltering reopening of the nations public schools, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has closely followed Trumps guidance on the pandemic, has led the charge. And like the president, DeSantis has depicted the 2020 college football season as essential to the nations civic health.

At the end of the day, this is a season that these student-athletes will not be able to get back, DeSantis recently told conservative commentator Clay Travis, who has repeatedly tried to downplay the effects of the pandemic. He not only wants players back on the field but fans back in stadiums like Florida States Bobby Bowden Field, which can seat 80,000 people. There will be fans at Bowden Field, confirmed DeSantis spokesman Fred Piccolo Jr. to Yahoo News. Perhaps not filling stadiums but yes, he wrote in an email.

The public health expert Jha believes that even if schools allowed only 10 percent capacity at stadiums, fans would still congregate to drink, shout, cheer and heckle in close proximity. These are not piano concertos that they are watching, he said. And because fans often travel long distances to attend games, the parking lots (usually home to tailgating parties) could become potent transmission vectors.

I wouldnt go to a football game this fall in most parts of the country, Jha said. In his estimation, only the Northeast, which used restrictive lockdown measures to bring the coronavirus to heel, could host college football games this fall. Other parts of the country may be more eager, but they are also less prepared. Its too risky, Jha told Yahoo News. I wouldnt do it.

That isnt likely to please Trump, who wants to see full stadiums across the Midwest, Southwest and South, where both football and Trump are enormously popular.

Already, however, some of the countrys major conferences are following the lead of the Ivy League. Both the Pac-12, whose members are on the West Coast, and the Big Ten, whose members include Midwestern powerhouses like Ohio State and Penn State, have canceled the fall season. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren specifically cited myocarditis as a reason for his decision. Any time you're talking about the heart of anyone, but especially a young person, you have to be concerned, he told ESPN.

Those concerns havent kept fans from venting, though it isnt the athletes or athletic directors they are upset at. Ive heard more anger directed at the president than I thought, an ESPN college football radio host told the New York Times earlier this month.

As with virtually every aspect of the pandemic, different parts of the country have interpreted the same epidemiological developments like the recent findings about myocarditis in different ways. That confusion has been exacerbated by overlapping authorities between the federal government and individual states. In the case of college football, there is also the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or NCAA, and conferences like the Big Ten, which stretches from New Jersey to Nebraska.

The NCAA has said it would be dangerous to proceed with a college football season. Carlos del Rio, an Emory University epidemiologist advising the NCAA on the coronavirus, compared the situation to something rather less heroic than the Normandy invasion. I feel like the Titanic, he said last week. We have hit the iceberg and were trying to make decisions of what time should we have the band play.

Some conferences are proceeding in any case, with the Southeastern Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference leading the way. An official at the SEC said it was implementing testing and other protocols to keep players safe. Still, he cautioned that the situation could change, especially since the coronavirus continues to sicken thousands daily in SEC states like Georgia and Florida. The official added that Trumps tweets dont carry much weight with commissioner Greg Sankey. That cant influence our decision, the official said.

Trump may not have any direct influence on conferences or schools, but he can exert pressure on governors, who are heavily reliant on the federal government during a time of national crisis. Those governors, in turn, set budgetary priorities for state university systems. That creates incentives for schools to follow the presidents directive.

That may explain why DeSantis visited Florida State last week, where he sat at a table with its president, John Thrasher, who is also the former head of the states GOP. Also at the table was athletic director Coburn, the football coach and two players from the team.

Were here to say, from the state of Florida, we want you guys to play, said DeSantis, who played baseball at Yale. He appeared to say, much like Trump, that it was more dangerous to leave college athletes to their own devices. The environment that sports provides at a place like Florida State is a safer environment for these kids than what they would have if they didnt have access to this environment, the governor, who is 41, argued.

His spokesman, Piccolo, later told Yahoo News that Florida was justified in urging college football at its state universities. NASCAR, the PGA tour, the NBA, the NHL and many more sports organizations have figured out a way to do it, he said, though those are all professional leagues that can sequester players in a way that a university cannot.

No one is forcing anyone to play or to go to the stadium to watch, Piccolo said. Those who want to play and those who want to watch should be able to.

But even players who do want to play appear to be running into problems. Two days after DeSantiss press conference, Florida State wide receiver Warren Thompson posted an open letter on Twitter. The lies from our leaders have backed myself into corner putting my overall well being in jeopardy, the letter said. The neglect to respond to this issue is very concerning.

Thompsons letter was reportedly occasioned by revelations that a player who had contracted the coronavirus had been allowed to take part in team activities even after testing positive.

Thompson has since apologized for questioning his teams commitment to safety, and the school is moving forward with its football season as if those concerns had never been raised. Florida States first game is against Georgia Tech on Sept. 12.

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Why Trump and the Republicans have turned college football into a new 'Normandy' - Yahoo News