College football’s bowl schedule was announced the other day. So were a bunch of kickoff times. It all felt…normal. Which felt kind of weird.
For fifteen months now, sports—like so many other things—have had a veil of confusion upon them. There has been little certainty. Whether games will be played has been a question in a way such a thing was never really a question before. I used to think hurricanes jacked up the college football schedule. I hope for no hurricanes this year, and I don’t mean to minimize them in their worldly scope, but how quaint it feels to wonder if Florida might have a buy game nixed by a September storm.
There will, of course, be uncertainty. I am not qualified to pronounce the pandemic over in the United States, and I’m aware people are still dying of the coronavirus here, and I’d imagine there are nightmarish scenarios in which the virus surges again. Even if the current positive trends do continue, it wouldn’t be surprising if one or more of the 70 Power Five teams (or however many there are) suffer a coronavirus outbreak. But with many colleges able to mandate vaccinations (as they already do for all the other, more traditional disease outbreaks they’ve been tasked with stopping), it’s possible that number will be zero. It’s possible this really will be a full, normal college football season, in which the schedule is clear and the games happen when they’re supposed to and our collective difficulty comparing résumés comes from things like margins of victory and game control, rather than whether a team’s played half as many games as its counterpart. If that’s the case, it feels good. It feels good for things to feel normal again.
You said it. We’re all feeling it.