Full-capacity crowds have returned to stadiums across the country as the pandemic winds down. It’s part of a fantastic resurgence for American sports after the initial pandemic cancellations and a reminder of just how wrong cancel-happy sports media figures were throughout.
Sports Illustrated’s Peter King would “absolutely not say that Ron DeSantis” did a good job handling the virus back in May 2020. Florida’s GOP governor, of course, oversaw one of the best pandemic responses in the country, keeping Florida’s death rate in the middle of the pack compared to the rest of the country despite the state’s larger elderly population while not suffocating businesses with excessive lockdowns and restrictions.
King still can’t show much joy for the return of sports crowds, despite attending the Super Bowl in Florida earlier this year. King chose to respond to a fan sending him a picture of a packed Atlanta Braves ballpark by citing the total number of people in the country killed by the virus rather than celebrating the progress made toward the return of crowds, even though there remains no evidence that sports crowds of any capacity have substantially spread the virus.
Others, like the Atlantic’s Jemele Hill, said that “college football” was in denial about the pandemic. By “college football,” she meant coaches and universities, but it was the players themselves who pushed for their seasons to be played in the fall. And, of course, they weren’t in denial: The only known college football player to die from the coronavirus attended a university that had already postponed its college football season.
The worst offender was USA Today’s Christine Brennan. There was no level of sensationalism that Brennan wouldn’t reach in decrying the return of sports, even without fans. When the Big Ten Conference decided that it would end up playing football in the fall after all, Brennan declared that the decision was a worse scandal than four different sexual assault scandals at Big Ten universities, including Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky, who sexually assaulted children, and Michigan State’s Larry Nassar, whose scandal threw USA Gymnastics into bankruptcy.
When the NFL Network’s Kyle Brandt suggested that some in sports media were rooting for the virus, a USA Today opinion piece claimed it was stupid. A few months later, Brennan proceeded to take a victory lap over 68-year-old Alabama coach Nick Saban testing positive for the virus. She looked pretty bad when Saban’s result turned out to be a false positive. Nonetheless, Brennan praised cancellations of all kinds while declaring it was “madness” to play sports during the pandemic, but doomsday never arrived.
There was never substantial evidence that sports or fans were dangerous spreaders of the virus, but even now, someone like King can’t praise the progress toward normalcy that has been made. Fans have returned in full to baseball, MMA, and boxing, with boxing star Canelo Alvarez bringing over 73,000 to AT&T Stadium in Texas just this past weekend. Sports are back, fortunately, and it’s because people didn’t listen to figures such as King, Brennan, or Hill.
