Come November, Nick Saban is scheduled to return to Tiger Stadium for the eighth time (once with the Miami Dolphins and seven times at Alabama) since his abrupt departure from LSU 15 years ago. The Nov. 7 date pitting LSU’s defending national champs against the team that has captured five of the last 10 college football titles is scheduled to be the ninth game on the slate for Ed Orgeron’s crew in 2020.
From this vantage point, it is projected that LSU vs. Alabama at Death Valley will be the opener for both schools in a season infected by Covid-19. This prediction depends on whether we are fortunate enough to have a football season amid thousands of Americans succumbing to coronavirus.
Health professionals and public officials are playing on foreign turf when analyzing what happens next in a frenetic and deadly environment, but there is hope since China was able to contain its outbreak in three months if the numbers from that country are believable.
The United States has the highest outbreak of total coronavirus cases in the world, doubling the number for China, which has four times the population of America .Louisiana is second in the country in per capita cases thanks to Mardi Gras and has a death count more than four times the national average. As is often the case, Louisiana is at the bottom rung of a bad list.
Historian John Barry of New Orleans penned the definitive book about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which took 675,000 America lives at a time when the national population was 103 million people. In the fall of 1918, the U.S. also won a World War, and the Spanish Flu returned with a vengeance after a summer of abatement.
Provided our country does not receive a second wave of the disease when the weather gets milder, there will be Herculean efforts to salvage football. It is an economic and emotional engine that cannot be disregarded. The first Tuesday in November also provides a presidential election.
Those who live and die at the ballot box do not want to watch their careers evaporated in a Covid-19 haze. Look for football to begin at some time around the Nov. 3 election.
When the U.S. battled a collapse of the financial industry in 2008, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a best-selling book titled “Too Big to Fail” about the federal bailouts that saved the country from a Depression-era financial calamity.
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