The college football season came to a fantastic end Monday night in Indianapolis, with Georgia defeating Alabama 33-18 to win the school’s first national championship since 1980.
“How about this university? How about these fans? This is a special moment for the University of Georgia, a special moment for this team,” Georgia head coach Kirby Smart said in his postgame interview.
“How about these fans” is right. In fact, it’s what made the 2021 college football season so incredibly special.
As we prepared for the start of the regular season in August, we weren’t sure what to expect. The pandemic-shortened 2020 season was a major downer. With little to no fans in the stands, everything that makes college football great — the passion and pageantry — was noticeably missing.
And while crowds had started to return to basketball arenas toward the end of the 2021 NBA Playoffs, we still were unsure if stadiums with a capacity of 100,000+ would be filled to the brim as COVID-19 continued to rage.
The answer to the question came with the loud roar of hundreds of thousands of college football fans across the country.
In week one, stadiums from Blacksburg, VA, to Madison, WI, were rocking, dripping with decades of tradition.
Days after the opening weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on CNN with an appalled member of the media, to chastise the large crowds without a mask in sight.
“I don’t think it’s smart,” Fauci said of college football crowds. “Outdoors is always better than indoors, but even when you have such a congregate setting of people close together – you should be vaccinated. And when you do have congregate settings, particularly indoors, you should be wearing a mask.”
Fauci said that in order to attend some large events during the fall, you would need to “get vaccinated.”
“We could be stuck in outbreak mode and that’s why I think what you’re going to be seeing is…a lot more local mandates,” Fauci said.
“There are gonna be organizations, there are gonna be universities, there are gonna be colleges, there are gonna be sports events, travel events, where the rule is going to be if you wanna participate – you get vaccinated,” Fauci added. “If not – sorry, you’re not going to be able to do it.”
College football fans everywhere responded with laughter.
As many parts of the country continued to cower in fear in the face of COVID-19, fans of football in the South and the Midwest said “enough,” deciding that life needed to go on.
It was a direct revolt against the establishment media and the ruling class. As Fauci and the Biden administration continued to hammer their message that we were heading for a winter of death, fans continued to pack into stadiums. It may not seem like much, but the small display of defiance was exactly what the country needed. Week in and week out, college fans packed stadiums, gathering as a community to celebrate college sports as we have for a hundred years. Mass illness and death never occurred from the millions of fans that gathered to watch football, flying directly in the face of the message from our nations’ leaders. Even as the Delta variant hit our shores, college football rolled on through the pandemic, showing the rest of us that it was ok to return to normalcy.
We owe fans of the game a thank you for showing the world that despite challenges, life goes on. You can’t protect yourself from all the dangers of the world, so you might as well get together with friends and family to enjoy the beautiful sport of college football.
Joe Morgan is the Sports Reporter for The Daily Wire. Most recently, Morgan covered the Clippers, Lakers, and the NBA for Sporting News. Send your sports questions to [email protected].
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Source: Dailywire
