how long can we withstand this?

First I think that USA Rugby's failure is only loosely related to the current shutdown. They were in trouble before this all started.

The sports landscape will come out of the pandemic vastly changed. Which sports will be made poorer and which will emerge in as good or in better shape is unknown. It "may" be that we will actually see, overall, an improved landscape for sports after the virus runs its course, if it does.

I think the weakest and maybe the newest leagues will see similar failures to what USA Rugby has seen but it is also possible that the biggest leagues will see such a financial hardship that they fail. I do not think that any of the "major" sports are really geared for an extended period without income from games actually getting played. TV is the major source of income for many sports and I am sure that the contracts keep income, to some extent, coming in even without games being played. But that also cannot continue if games are not being played. There is limit to what the TV networks can continue to support over time.

This pandemic will have impacts that we cannot even guess at and, in spite of what many leaders want us to believe, the economy is not endlessly able to have resources shuffled around to artificially bolster itself. Right now the economy is much like a pyramid scheme and sometime, in the not too distal future, it will collapse of the excessive debt that is created by that very shuffle.

Sports leagues cannot pay players and coaches without income for long and the result will either be bankruptcies or players not getting payed or both. Since the NWSL is still riding US Soccer's money horse and that horse is not getting fed as much as it was it will eventually founder if it does not do something. The life of women's soccer is the life of the fat of the USSF and that fat is not that great.

In other countries we have some healthier models but many of those are supported by large men's soccer clubs and those clubs are as much in danger as any here.

I do not know, any more than anybody else does, what will actually happen but, if the shutdown of sports continues for long I do not think any sport, male or female or unknown will emerge unscathed. I do believe that world wide women's sports, except maybe mud wrestling, will be among the first to be hurt but I do not think that all women's sports will be eliminated in fact I think there are few that will actually be eliminated but there will be many changed a LOT.

I hope that I am wrong about the run of the effects of this pandemic and I hope I am wrong about the time the shutdown will continue but I think we are in for at least another year and if any sports or governments try to lift restrictions too soon we will see the outbreak restart with all the fury it has had in the last month.

We just need to wait and see but we should be prepared for the worst.

 

People are going to rush out of the gates craving anything in a stadium, they'd pay 20 dollars to go to a stadium to watch paint dry at this point. I think the leagues are going to be fine after this is over.

 

I pretty much agree if the end is by September or October but much later than that and many leagues and clubs may have little left to get restarted with. You can only relocate money so many times before someone actually notices that the money is not really where it is supposed to be.

My guess, as I said earlier, is that there will be a lot of changes in sports when we come out of this pandemic we may even see failures of various leagues around the world because they can only continue paying without income for so long. The leagues that fail may not be the ones we expect and it is possible that some of the strongest appearing may be the ones that prove to be the weakest.

 

FIFA is already thinking of reaching their emergency funds to keep the clubs alive.

 

Many people will not have the disposable income to attend sports after this is over. If astronomical salaries for players and ever-escalating league-TV contracts come back to reality as a result of the pandemic, that would be a good thing.
Sport is entertainment; it is not life itself. (Sorry, Jackdoggy.)

 

And after the first person in the stands who sneezes, the people are then going to rush out of the exits. This is going to take a lot of confidence build for people to attend sporting events.

 

Actually I doubt that will happen. People are often not smart enough to understand what is true and what is not. People are still gathering together and the outbreak is not even close to its peak. People are not smart enough to follow current instructions why would anyone believe that they will be smart enough to panic when presented with the possibility of a renewed infection?

"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." George Carlin

 

I fear if college football is delayed/postponed, we'll probably see more sports (such as soccer) getting eliminated due to the lack of revenue. Just my opinion

 

I have always believed that sports, in the form you currently see in colleges, does not belong there. The minor sports like soccer are there for no real reason and the major sports like American football and basketball are simply bastardized pro sports. I believe education and sports, again like they are now in colleges, should be kept separate.

To me anything that gets the inarticulate and effectively illiterate "jocks" out of education is a good thing. Sports are simply a distraction from the learning that should be happening in school.

 

I pretty much agree with you. Several years ago I decided that big time college sports such as football and basketball were no longer interesting to me. The incident was a college football game. Several times during the game a guy wearing a red blazer stepped onto the field and stopped the action to allow time for a TV commercial.

Neither the college, the refs, or the players were in charge. It was the guy in the red sport coat. He signaled when play was to stop and when it was to resume.

I was offended -- and I concluded that the commercialization of college sports had gone too far.

 

Yes and no. My college girlfriend was a field hockey player and the system seems to work for those smaller sports. The problem is football and basketball have become such cash cows.

 

Quite

possibly the most uneducated post I have read. You obviously don’t have a kid in college sports yet you pontificate on something you know nothing about. Please stop

 

This is some serious stereotyping. Also as a former collegiate athlete (women's soccer), I couldn't disagree with you more.

There's certainly things to fix or modify in collegiate athletics, and certainly much more so in the "major" sports like college football than the smaller sports, but I wouldn't just sweep it all away.

 

Unfortunately, it isn't. College sports have helped plenty of students get ahead but it has also hurt students. I grew up in Canton, Ohio and my school was a football factory. That's what happens when you're literally next door to the Hall Of Fame. We had a bunch of football players get scholarships and come out on the other side functionally illiterate.

The way universities treated students may have changed over the years. At UCincinnati, football and basketball reigned supreme, other athletes treated like crap. I don't know if it is still that way but as a former tutor, I can tell you the money sports did not churn out the highest quality people.

 

Sorry, but a personal anecdote of "a bunch" of players in one specific sport at one specific school is just a further example of stereotyping, not a refuting of it. "Functionally illiterate jocks" does NOT describe all student athletes; I'd even point out in this forum that it especially does not describe all, or even most, female collegiate soccer players.

 

I have seen that money is often used as an excuse for college athletics but that kind of falls on its face when you see that almost all revenue generated by the athletic departments go simply into supporting said departments and little into helping education at all. In fact in many cases very little revenue generated by a particular sport goes into any other sport even within the same department.

There is something wrong when a Nobel Laureate gets less pay from a college than a functional moron that happens to be an assistant basketball coach. That is quite common in colleges throughout the US.

 

Trying to use female soccer players to refute the functional illiteracy of jocks is also stereotyping. Many, possibly most, soccer players, or most "minor" sport athletes.for that matter, cannot even realistically dream of supporting themselves through their sport so they have to apply themselves to their studies. Scholarships are not even administered in the same way and most minor sport athletes must have some other means of support to get through school.

Basketball, Football (armored sumo wrestling) and even baseball players can dream of a future in their sport. Also a full scholarship really means a full scholarship. I do not know if it is still true but not too long ago soccer scholarships could be split and they could be removed if a player was not able to play or if another player came along that was better.

There is nothing wrong with playing sports and going to school at the same time it is just that I believe they should not be tied together.

 

I'm not attempting to refute. My point is the money sports (football,basketball) make little effort at producing educated students. The system seems to work well for other sports (field hockey, women's soccer) as the students focus is on education. When a university focuses solely on the money sports, it loses its purpose of existing.

 

Why were you offended that a guy whose job it is to alert the teams of a TV time out performs the job he was hired to perform? Coaches and players don't have time to deal with that.

Viewers don't see anything on TV these days without commercials, and haven't in several decades, for the most part. If you can't attend the game in person (and, even at the finest programs, the attendance rarely gets into six figures, so plenty of people who'd like to watch live cannot do so), then a broadcast is necessary. It just plain makes no sense to run plays while hundreds of thousands of alumni and fans are watching a commercial.

Does this functional moron have a name you can attach to your post?

I can imagine an environment where schools aren't really places where people share their common interests (like sports), but are more like a workplace where you go in, take your classes, go back to the dorm and nothing else matters- not athletics, art, music, dance, etc. They exist. They're called vocational schools. No colors, no mascot, no memories- just job prep.

 

The US does not have the best college education system in the world any more. There are several countries that are turning out people with better and more functional educations particularly at the middle levels and virtually none of those have school sports anything like what we have in the USA.

Somehow the USA has decided that you need a lot of extra fluff to fill out a real education but other countries seem to manage to turn out well rounded people without all the extra crap.

I do not believe that sports, fraternities, sororities or any of the extra function have any real value for the future of a student.

But that kind of begs the question of the fact that most people who go to college gain nothing from it. Most would be better off entering the workforce in some kind of apprentice program.

I taught for a while in a physics program in a major college and 99% of the athletes taking my class never paid attention and came close to failing the class. They learned nothing. The department also offered a series of classes designed for athletes and chearleaders, although I did not teach that class, that had as its primary purpose getting the "students" a passing grade to keep them eligible of their important job of playing sports or cheering. We called it "Football Physics" and it was taught virtually without math.

I wish we could divorce major sports from education.

While there are students that benefit from sports the majority do not and many are actually harmed by their delay entering the workforce.

The purpose of college is to educate not to provide a social program for the uneducated.

 

One of the perks of being at the top of this unnecessary competition is that all sorts of labor should recede.

You have, at the very least, a masters in education or in the specific field. Why speak to deny anyone else the degrees you yourself possess?

Ah, but not the smaller ones where kids from wealthy homes do physical things as part of the upper classes' leisure time. Sooo, Vontavious with decent but not scholly-worthy grades and a family with no money for his education has to go be something blue-collar, but Conor, Trace and Sarah Becky get legacy or donation preference treatment in admissions and then get to play golf or lacrosse or woso or field hockey, too?

You never did name that functional moron who has at least one degree and probably two (most head and assistant jobs are administrative).

The NFL and NBA offer jobs that pay more than the average salary in this country. The schools whose developmental programs feed the NFL and NBA earn money from the broadcast deals they get. They offer more to their employees than the average art major or dance major or voice major earns if they work in their field, and more than pro field hockey or woso or LAX. Nobody ever told an aspiring classical trumpet player that he needed to go work at the damn sawmill.

Let's not go down the slippery slope of "Fine Arts". Instead, gut them all, if we're going to gut gridiron. If it's okay for trust fund children to participate in extracurriculars that very few people care about, it should be okay for the rest of us to participate in sports that are popular enough to maybe find work in the industry.