Sports
Maybe the Big Ten made the right decision. Maybe. Maybe the three remaining Power 5 conferences will be forced to push their fall season into January and beyond, like the Big Ten and Pac-12 have. So many maybes. Still, what happened in the Big Ten on Aug. 11 was a tremendous show of power by the league’s presidents/chancellors. Reports mention Big Ten athletics directors being aligned in their desire to play and/or allow the mechanisms built into the schedule, that was released just six days before the league pulled the plug on fall 2020, to do their job, which was to buy time to see if the coronavirus could be managed among Big Ten football programs. Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren did what the presidents/bosses told him to do. It was a very unpopular decision. Now, fast forward a bit. It’s 2021. The Big Ten wants to show you its best stuff after taking fall 2020 off. If the ADs were cut out of this decision by the presidents and Warren, how do they work together going forward? Can they align? Can they trust each other? A group of Nebraska football players submitted a lawsuit Wednesday. The Big Ten responded Thursday with, basically, “talk to the hand.” This abrupt decision and how it went down will have long-ranging effects. We get to a lot of it in today’s podcast. We talk about the four sports Iowa cut this week — men’s and women’s swimming, men’s tennis and men’s gymnastics. A university like Iowa should have swimming. It doesn’t anymore. This week, we talk a lot about the grim headlines. Next week, let’s shoot for something better than “grim.”