I recently read what I believe to be the worst sports blog of all time. It is titled “Big Ten screws over Indiana, rewards COVID-y team with not enough wins” and was written by Julie DiCaro, a Senior Writer/Editor at Deadspin. I encourage you to read it in full, but I will quote from it liberally. For the benefit of those who do not follow college football, I briefly provide for the background on the 2020 Big Ten season and how teams have been impacted by the pandemic. Then I give several reasons why DiCaro’s Deadspin blog is incredibly dumb.
I. Background: The 2020 Big Ten season
On August 11, 2020, the Big Ten Conference “postponed” (read:cancelled) its fall 2020 football season. Many fans, coaches and university administrators were upset, but a few were much more vocal than the others. Of the Big Ten’s fourteen member institutions, it is widely accepted that two universities–the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and The Ohio State University—were the key drivers in getting the conference to reverse that decision. On September 16, the Big Ten did just that.
What is painfully obvious in hindsight is that the Big Ten’s plan was doomed from the start. As far as virus protocols, the Big Ten decided to rely heavily on the use of rapid antigen tests. Currently, Big Ten teams have to administer daily testing of players and coaching staff. Players who test positive for the virus have to sit out for 21 days (compared to 14 in the SEC and 10 in other power conferences) and if the proportion of players who test positive for the virus (or proportion of players and staff who tested positive) is above a certain threshold percentage, a team cannot engage in football activities, including practices and games, for a certain time. Any cancelled game is ruled a no-contest and not a loss for either team.
The schedule that the Big Ten adopted a few days later provided for 8 regular-season games (6 divisional and 2 cross-divisional) for each team, with no bye weeks and no chance to reschedule games. The schedule also provided for the Big Ten Football Championship Game on December 19. Unlike the ACC, whose championship game will take the two teams with the highest winning percentage, the Big Ten decided to keep its normal East-West format that was used pre-pandemic: the team with the best record in each division would play the corresponding team in the other division. The East division champion has beaten the West division champion every year (six in a row), and consequently the East—which consists of Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Indiana, Maryland, and Rutgers—is widely regarded as the stronger division. What is critical for this blog, however, is that on October 22 the Big Ten adopted tie-breaker rules which included a minimum games stipulation that “[a] team must play at least six games to be considered for participation in the championship game” (the “6-Game Requirement”).
After all that, Big Ten games started to be played. And Big Ten games started to be cancelled. As of December 9, Indiana had gone 6-1 with its only loss in 35-42 game at Ohio State. As of December 9, Ohio State had only played 5 games: Maryland paused team activities resulting in the cancellation of its game hosting Ohio State, and two weeks later Ohio State paused activities and cancelled its game at Illinois. Critically, on December 8, Michigan announced that its annual rivalry game with Ohio State—”The Game”, the game that has been played every year for over 100 years, the game that Ohio State cares more about than any other, the game with the HBO movie, the game worth about $18.5 million to FOX in ads this year—was cancelled due to an outbreak in the Michigan program. That put Ohio State below the 6-Game Requirement with no more games to play before the championship game. Under the rules at the time, Indiana would represent the East against Northwestern from the West. That same day, Indiana announced it was pausing football activities because of a rising number of positives.
The next day, on December 9, the Big Ten announced that it voted to eliminated the six-game minimum requirement. Per the release, “[t]he decision was based on a competitive analysis which determined that Ohio State would have advanced to the Big Ten Football Championship Game based on its undefeated record and head-to-head victory over Indiana regardless of a win or loss against Michigan.” Shortly thereafter, Indiana and Purdue announced the cancellation of their rivalry game because of positive spikes among both programs.
For additional context, Ohio State has won the Big Ten Football Championship for the past 3 years. Ohio State is favored by over 20 points to beat Northwestern and win its fourth Big Ten championship in a row. Ohio State is currently ranked #4 in the College Football Playoff rankings, a position they held at the time the 6-game minimum was eliminated. Ohio State won the CFP National Championship Game in the 2014 season and has played in a CFP semifinal in two other seasons since, including last season. The last Big Ten team that was not Ohio State to claim a national championship was Michigan in 1997. Ohio State has beaten Indiana in 25 straight match-ups, which is the longest active streak between any two teams in the FBS.
II. Analysis
The Deadspin blog begins with a disclaimer:
I went to IU. Historically, we are a basketball school, though even that has fallen in shadow after the glory days of the 80s and early 90s. My point is, we are not, and have never been, a football school.
Except for this season.
Let me provide my own disclaimer. I am an alumnus of The Ohio State University. The Ohio State Buckeyes are one of the few “blue blood” football programs and Ohio State is arguably the most consistently well-performing of those blue-bloods at that, with rare and short-lived down periods. My point is, I don’t have anything against Indiana. They are clearly the good guys in the larger scheme of things as Ohio State is the evil empire of the Big Ten. What follows is my attempt to dispassionately, without favor to Ohio State, pick apart the two main contentions in the Deadspin blog: A) that Ohio State is more “COVID-y” than Indiana and B) that it was unfair to eliminate the 6-Game Requirement in the middle of the Big Ten season.
A few minor points about that disclaimer before we begin. First, having one successful season in football doesn’t make one a “football school.” That’s not how that works. “Football school” or “basketball school” refers to a culture built up over decades, not about how a single season plays out on the field. Second, why would this season be the one year that Indiana is a football school (since IU “have never been” one before), when Indiana was co-Big Ten champion in 1967 and earned a trip to the Rose Bowl that season? And third, if there is an “exception . . . this season ” to the rule that Indiana is not a football school (i.e., Indiana is a football school this season), I don’t see how it is logically consistent to also say that Indiana currently “are not . . . a football school,” present tense. It’s almost as if this Deadspin blog would benefit from a real editor. That’ll be a common theme throughout this blog.
A. Ohio State is not more “COVID-y” than Indiana
The first thread of DiCaro’s argument is that Indiana played by the rules and did everything right regarding COVID, that Ohio State didn’t, and that’s why Ohio State “didn’t meet the requirements everyone played under.”:
IU was able to play the number of games needed to play in the Big Ten Championship because they took COVID seriously this season. I’ve been to IU a few times this fall and I didn’t see anyone without a mask in public, even outdoors, and witnessed kids running over to Memorial Stadium for mandatory random COVID tests.
I don’t know what life was like during COVID at Ohio State, but I do know they’re coach pushed to play in the fall in the first place, he should have to accept the consequences of that decision.
. . .
What I also know is that one team did what was asked of them under the most difficult of circumstances. Another team didn’t. The former is being punished and the latter is being rewarded.
This is wrong on even a cursory examination. Ohio State did not play six games because of 1 week it had an outbreak in its own program, and 2 other weeks where its opponent had an outbreak in its program. (8-1-2 = 5 < 6). Indiana had 1 week where it had an outbreak forcing a game cancellation—the final week of the regular season—and the only outbreak any Indiana opponent had that would affect their game happened that same week as Indiana’s outbreak. (8-1-0 = 7 > 6). So Indiana was able to play the number of games it needed to play because it was lucky that its opponent in any given week wasn’t suffering from an outbreak, where Ohio State wasn’t lucky. That hardly seems to be Ohio State not doing what was asked of it.
In fact, it’s not clear that Indiana won’t end up “more COVID-y” than Ohio State. If Indiana can’t get its current outbreak under control, it might not be able to play next week in the Big Ten cross-divisional game for non-champions. Thus it will have not played 2 games because of an outbreak in its own program, where as Ohio State (as of the time of this writing) has gotten over the worst of its COVID outbreak around the time of the Illinois game weeks ago and is set to play Northwestern.
What’s incredibly puzzling to me is that DiCaro explicitly acknowledged that Indiana currently has an outbreak and that Ohio State only had one week of an outbreak of its own:
(Of course, as I’m writing this, the IU-Purdue Old Oaken Bucket game has been canceled due to COVID issues on both teams, because everything is terrible in 2020).
Ohio State, on the other hand, even had their head coach, Ryan Day, test positive at the end of November. Three Ohio State games were canceled this season because of COVID concerns, one of them, against Illinois, because of the number of positive tests among the Buckeyes, leaving them at 5-0 and one game short of the mandatory six games needed to play in the Big Ten Championship Game.
As seen in the first excerpt, DiCaro credits the culture of COVID caution in Bloomington, Indiana (which she has seen herself a few times this fall) as the reason why Indiana’s opponents did not get outbreaks right before they played Indiana Indiana had no outbreaks only had one outbreak. And she acknowledges that she says this without having seen whether the same things are true in Columbus, Ohio. How then does she determine that Ohio State was more lax in its COVID safety than Indiana? Two reasons.
The first reason, which is explicit, is that Ohio State head football coach Ryan Day vigorously, to the surprise of no one, “insisted on playing football this fall, come hell or high water” and he eventually tested positive for COVID. Therefore, Ryan Day and the entire Ohio State program must have treated COVID less seriously. The logic of this is strained. Pandemics (“pan” = all; “demos” = people) tend to affect everyone, even the cautious. Assigning moral blame to a contagious disease strikes me as quite ill-informed victim-blaming. I doubt this reasoning would ever be applied to Pennsylvania’s Governor, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, or the 42 city of Bloomington employees who have tested positive, including 7 reported just this week. And I wonder whether this blameworthiness would also apply to the other Big Ten head coaches who have tested positive: Purdue’s Jeff Brohm, Wisconsin’s Paul Chryst, and Maryland’s Mike Locksley. Somehow, because Ryan Day was the fiercest advocate for returning to football along with Nebraska’s Scott Frost (who has not tested positive), Ohio State must not have taken the right precautions but Indiana did. Nevermind that Ohio State has, and has always had, the highest expectations for this season and thus the most to lose from a COVID derailment.
The second reason, which is implicit, is that Bloomington is a bastion full of Democratic “libs”, so obviously Indiana University would take the pandemic more seriously than The Ohio State University
What’s more, for the vast majority of the season, IU (and Bloomington in general), has done a relatively good job of keeping the spread of COVID somewhat at bay. I say “relatively” because IU has always been a beautiful blue island full of libs in the midst of a blood-red state that currently has the second-highest per capita COVID rate in the entire U-nited States.
I think that using partisan affiliation as a proxy for coronavirus precautions is facile, but I don’t know much about the data there. So even accepting that that is true, it might surprise DiCaro to know that virtually every college town or major city—which describes the home of every Big Ten school—is heavily Democratic-leaning. This applies equally to Bloomington, IN and Columbus, OH. In fact, taking the results of the last presidential election, voters in Monroe County, IN voted 63.12% in favor of Democratic nominee Biden while Franklin County, OH voted 65% in favor. Furthermore, Ohio’s governor Mike DeWine (Columbus is the capital of Ohio) drew praise among the media for his early response to the pandemic and elicited tweets from Trump calling for DeWine to be voted out next cycle. While Columbus doesn’t appreciate people saying “Go Blue”, it doesn’t appear to be any less of a “beautiful blue island” than Bloomington when it comes to the coronavirus.
B. It Is Not Unfair to Eliminate the 6-Game Requirement in the Middle of the Season
The second thread of DiCaro’s argument is that there is something untoward about changing the championship eligibility rules in the middle of the season by eliminating the 6-Game Requirement:
In what world do sports conferences change the rules, midseason, to allow one team to leapfrog another?
As an initial matter, it is not clear that DiCaro knows where or when the 6-Game Requirement came from:
It’s not like this Big Ten season started on time or in the before times. The Big Ten, having first made the correct, adult decision to postpone the 2020 season, was then subsequently brow-beaten into having a season in the midst of the worst pandemic since 1918. They knew what the possibilities were. If they wanted to suspend the 6-game rule for the season, that was the time to do it.
The Big Ten didn’t decide to “suspend” the 6-Game Requirement for this season, after keeping it around for every other season before. The 6-Game Requirement was only announced on October 22 of this year—one day before the first Big Ten game—as a tie-breaker procedure in the event of cancelled games. The 6-Game Requirement didn’t exist at all in prior seasons, because every other season before this didn’t call for a tie-breaker that accounted for cancelled games. (See the normal Big Ten tie-breakers). And as the Big Ten announcement eliminated the 6-Game Requirement made clear, the reasons justifying the 6-Game Requirement at the beginning of the season were no longer applicable on December 9 because undefeated Ohio State beat Indiana head-to-head and Ohio State could have lost to Michigan (ha!) and still would have had a better record than IU. There was no doubt about who the better team would be through 6 games.
But even if the 6-Game Requirement was not announced the day before the 2020 season kicked-off to address a concern no longer applicable on December 9, so what? Changing any rule in the middle of the season, just like any retroactive or ex post facto law, is theoretically bad because it did not allow a team to choose a course of conduct that would be more beneficial under the new regime. The harm stems from the fact that a team relied on the old rule.
But how could Indiana have relied on the 6-Game Requirement? Put another way, what would Indiana have done differently if there were no 6-Game Requirement to begin with? Perhaps Indiana did not try as hard to beat Ohio State because Indiana knew Ohio State would be ineligible for the Big Ten Championship because of the 6-Game Requirement. But if so, Indiana would need to have incredible powers of foresight, as Ohio State had two of its three games cancelled after the Indiana-Ohio State game. And more basically, it’s incredible to think that Indiana would not spend as much energy as possible on beating Ohio State—something they haven’t done in 25 years and would have been a program-defining upset—because Ohio State would be disqualified latter when a win against Ohio State would have mooted the entire issue. Perhaps Indiana would have spent less energy on COVID caution if it knew that it would not have been made ineligible by operation of the 6-Game Requirement. But suggesting that Indiana could be doing more to prevent COVID would go entirely contrary to the thesis that Indiana and Bloomington football cares about COVID more than football.
I find it very telling that the actual team affected by the elimination of the 6-Game Requirement has said what really kept Indiana out of the championship game: “We had a chance to to earn our spot in the Big Ten Championship Game, but ultimately fell a touchdown short on the road against a great Ohio State team.”
That’s just how wins and losses work every year. Credit to Indiana for their reasonable response and their great season.
***
In sum, I find the lines of argumentation in this Deadspin blog so removed from reality that they would be laughed out of any sports bar. DiCaro describes herself as a “recovering lawyer”. I presume she was laughed out of that bar first.
This was Just My Blog.