Sunday, July 19, 2020

Rose Parade cancelled because of pandemic, college football season in jeopardy

I made a prediction of sorts in Marching music for the Puerto Rico Primary: "Because of The COVID-19 pandemic, there might not be a Rose Parade next year. Anyone care to make a bet?" None of my readers took me up on the wager, which is probably a good thing for them, as KTLA reported 2021 Rose Parade canceled due to COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday.

The 132nd Rose Parade has been canceled because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, marking the first time in 75 years that the beloved and eagerly anticipated New Year’s Day tradition won’t be held. Courtney Friel reports for KTLA 5 News on July 15, 2020.
CBS Los Angeles has a better written intro more dramatically delivered in 2021 Rose Parade Canceled For The First Time In 75 Years. The clip also has better archive footage and person-in-the-street interviews.

The 2021 Tournament of Roses Parade has been officially canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I wish I could say I was surprised, but I could see this coming. So could Luis of Music213, who made the announcement on his YouTube channel.
For the first time since World War II, the 2021 Rose Parade has been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. This was highly expected. It is unfortunate, but the Rose Parade Committee made the right decision. Stay safe everyone and take care of yourselves and your loved ones.
I really don't have anything to add to that other than I agree with everything Luis wrote.

Follow over the jump for news about the Rose Bowl and the rest of college football.

As the news reports above noted, the Rose Bowl game is still scheduled to be played, but that depends on the state of college football. The two conferences that traditionally play each other in the Rose Bowl, the Big Ten has and the Pac 12 have both cancelled all non-conference games. That may not be as relevant as usual because the 2021 Rose Bowl is a College Football Playoff semi-final game, so the teams could be from different conferences. Even so, they may not be able to participate, either. CNBC offered this gloomy assessment.
The college football doomsday clock is about to strike midnight as the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic inches the upcoming season closer to cancellation.

With U.S. cases over 70,000 per day and an increasing number of notable athletic departments, such as Ohio State, Clemson and Oklahoma, reporting positive tests among student athletes, optimism about playing college football in 2020 has faded. NCAA President Mark Emmert expressed concerns about the worsening virus trends in a statement this week, saying, “If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get a much better handle of the pandemic.”

Now mere weeks away from training camps, the NCAA faces a difficult decision: With so much money on the line, is it possible, or even worth it, to play college football this season?
...
“Right now I don’t see a path in the current environment to how we play,” an anonymous Power Five athletic director told Yahoo Sports. “I’m confident we’ll get back to what we all think of as normal, but it may be a year before that happens.”
The article also reported that the Ivy League, MEAC, and Patriot Leagues have cancelled all fall sports while the CAA has cancelled the football season. In addition, the rest of the Power Five will likely follow the Big Ten and Pac 12 in cancelling non-conference games.

Normally I'd conclude this entry by recycling my observations about Americans and their entertainment: "America is quite clear about its screwed up priorities­. My experience has convinced me that the surest way to get Americans to act is to mess with their entertainm­ent" and "Americans want their entertainment, and will do just about anything to keep it going." While the loss of sports is definitely messing with Americans' entertainment, it is symptomatic of something more significant, as CNBC reported far down the article.
As catastrophic as a lost season could be, the absence of football could spell a much more concerning trend for the higher-education industry. If there’s no football, Pollard says it’s directly indicative of the U.S. Covid-19 situation being so bad students can’t return to campus. While college football could cost its industry $4 billion, the higher-education industry, expected to cross $2 trillion in value by 2026, according to Zion Market Research, would be looking at a much more significant loss.
Talk about burying the lede! Of course, it's what I just did, too. As someone who works in higher education, this concerns me more than the loss of football and marching bands for the year. I hope it concerns my readers as much as it does me.

I wrote that today's Sunday entertainment post might be a double feature in White House blocking CDC from testifying before Congress on reopening schools. In some ways, this already is, but I'll see if I can write another, even more serious entry about entertainment later today. Stay tuned to see if I succeed.

2 comments:

  1. I think these things should be cancelled, if we don't cancel much, rest assured (as a biologist pointed out, I was listening to), it will be a wave after wave thing. It's smarter, even business wise, to cancel and take profits losses now, and tempoarry, instead of taking loss after loss for the next couple years. Cool seeing a clip on the Rose Parade, haven't heard of that in years, I attended a Rose Parade in Pasedena years ago ... Later Guy ....

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    1. I agree with you. Games and parades make for super spreader events, which are the last things we need.

      When I lived in southern California, I would go to the Rose Parade almost every year with my family. Those count among my favorite holiday memories.

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