Ohio Stares Down Nuclear Winter
Nobody wants to be the one to pull the trigger on Ohio State's football season.
David Jesse of freepress.com reported yesterday morning that Big Ten university presidents voted 12-2 to cancel the season, with Iowa and Nebraska being the sole dissenters.
Coincidentally the vote came under 24 hours after Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields and other college football stars started tweeting a uniform statement declaring their willingness to play and desire to establish a college football players association, which wouldn’t have the legal juice of a union but would be a powerful step in the players’ inevitably realizing how much power they — and they alone — hold in a power structure that sees them paid off in Nike gear and coupons to the company store.
The NHL and NBA have proven that sports can be played in a bubble. These college football programs have the money to enact that bubble if it didn’t hamper their ability to claim in court that these players are “student-athletes” and not employees.
There’s also the issue of the coaches, players, and fans not being the ones on the hook for cutting a check for liability in during a pandemic of a novel virus we don’t know much about.
Heather Dincich of ESPN reports coronavirus has given at least five Big Ten Conference a heart condition, which is another example of how there are plenty of negative outcomes with this virus other than “death.”
The pushback in Ohio was inevitable from everyone from anonymous internet commenters to our Lieutenant Governor who has a brain as a baby’s powdered ass:
Husted apparently thinks college football players would become criminals if they didn’t have the structure supplied by collegiate programs. Good to know.
I would roll my eyes at just another random asshole on Twitter. The gall is a lot harder to take coming from one of the most powerful politicians in a state that didn’t mandate masks until a month ago and re-opened the economy (that was never entirely shut down in the first place) too early to appease their vampire friends in the Big Business community.
We’re sitting on a $3 billion raining day fund, and the state government is skimping on an extra $100 dollars for unemployed citizens who are out of a job due to government incompetence. The money printer only works in this country for the rich and well-connected.
In retrospect, it was probably a misstep to build so much of the Central Ohio economy around an ostensibly amateur football team of 18-22 year-olds. Bars and restaurants are already taking a battering that will last until Bill Gates figures out how to put a microchip in a vaccine, and that’s only one of the many economic spheres and supply chains who depend on millions of fans storming Columbus every year.
Nobody with two brain cells to rub together wants to be the single person standing in way of letting our boys play this fall. It’s not a joke to say that they would be driven from the state without round-the-clock federal protection from a team of out-of-state agents with zero Buckeye sympathies. I only say that as a matter of fact, not endorsement of a society with proper priorities.
Most Ohioans saw what happened to Dr. Amy Acton, and Governor Mike DeWine clearly doesn’t have the heart to sign his name on the death warrant of the beloved Buckeyes’ season.
Donald Trump is also smart enough to realize he doesn’t want to be the guy who has to campaign in Ohio after his blundering response to COVID-19 condemned us to a fall and winter without college football:
I prepared in March for a fall without football season. And by “prepared,” I mean did nothing other than posting a couple tweets so I could at least mutter, “Haha, told you so!” before a nurse inevitably shoved another tube down my throat when I’m hospitalized for COVID after drinking FourLoko out of a pothole on Sullivant Avenue on a random October Saturday because I have nothing better to do.
It seems like canceling the season is what the adults in the room would do. Unfortunately when it comes to football in this state, the inmates run the asylum.
And make no mistake: I am definitely in the top 10% of Buckeye Brained Dipshits. I hope they can figure out a way to play that doesn’t involve a player dying from COVID, in no small part because I have a lot of friends whose livelihood is covering the team for maniacs like me.
It’s hard for me to say to a guy like Buckeye senior defensive end Jonathan Cooper, a guy I covered when he was still a senior in high school in Gahanna, doesn’t have a case for why he should get to play:
The Power Five Conferences would have to cancel the season on the same day.
Of course that ship has sailed, and we’re looking a situation where the SEC has made it clear that they are playing the season even if they’re the only ones to go on a death march.
Given that Ohio State head coach Ryan Day has already broadcasted his willingness to join the SEC for one season, none of the other conferences will be keen on historically altering their conference in way that could forever benefit one of the rival cartels.
Feeling bad about watching won’t stop me from selfishly watching, because like everyone else in this world I’m a hypocrite.
The only thought more depressing than watching young men risk their lives playing a dumb-ass children’s game is if college football is cancelled, leaving me with only the godforsaken Cleveland Browns to keep me sane through the bleak winter to come.
I don’t even want to imagine a world in which the Browns and Buckeyes don’t play. That nuclear winter would see me having to remake my entire personality as a teetotaler. No thanks.
MEET THE NEW ASSHOLE, LESS CONSPICUOUS THAN THE OLD ASSHOLE
The last two Speakers of the Ohio House are under active FBI investigation. Republican Representatives lauded Bob Cupp (R-Lima), the newest Speaker, as a man of integrity committed to cleaning up the infamous culture of corruption within the Statehouse.
Which, sure! That makes a good campaign message. Unfortunately for Ohio, it’s not based in reality.
From David Moore of sludge.com:
Cupp has faced his share of ethics allegations stemming from his energy industry donations. During his unsuccessful 2012 re-election race for Supreme Court, Cupp’s Democratic challenger, retired judge William O’Neill, filed a formal complaint alleging that Cupp and another justice, Republican-appointed Terrence O’Donnell, violated Canon 1 of the Ohio Code of Judicial Conduct by taking campaign contributions from a party of interest in a case.
In the 2012 case in question, an attorney participated who was representing power provider Ohio Edison, which was owned by FirstEnergy, the Akron-based energy company at the center of the Householder bribery scandal. Two weeks after oral arguments, FirstEnergy’s PAC donated $6,300 to each of the re-election campaigns of Cupp and O’Donnell. Four weeks later, Cupp and O’Donnell joined a majority opinion favoring Ohio Edison in the case, O’Neill’s formal grievance detailed.
Catherine Turcer, executive director of the non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group Common Cause Ohio, told Sludge that Ohio has a long history of justices hearing the cases of their campaign contributors and not stepping away. “It’s fairly unusual for justices to recuse themselves, and when they do, we don’t know why they recuse themselves,” Turcer said. “In 2012, [then-candidate William] O’Neill put it out there: he made it clear that he wanted to focus on judicial independence, not receive campaign contributions, and identified it as a problem.
Larry Householder was not the disease. He was merely a symptom. FirstEnergy didn’t just decide on a whim to have an entire Vice President with the job summary to bribe shitheel state politicians. They built that operation over the course of years once they discovered the basement rate a state politician can be bought.
Color me skeptical that Cupp is the reformer some of his proponents would have us believe. Pardon me if I believe this moment calls for leaders who are viscerally repulsed at even the notion of corruption. Given these numbers, it’s clear Cupp is just some random grandpa and not the killer we need in Columbus.
At least more than half of the Democratic Caucus didn’t help enshrine him into power.
THOSE WMDs. How Trump killed tens of thousands of Americans… The coming eviction crisis in Columbus… The man who built a 40-yard fence around his neighbor’s property out of spite… The anonymous professor who didn’t exist… Selfies don’t kill people, and no places has been ruined by an Instagram post, either.