The American people need their collegiate athletics back – and with this ingenious, one-step plan, they’ll get them.

On July 30th, 2020, the Utah Jazz took to the homecourt floor of the New Orleans Pelicans, resuming an NBA season that had seen four and a half months without a single game. Only, it wasn’t anybody’s homecourt —  the game was the first of many to be played in the Disneyland Bubble, the quarantine zone in Orlando, Florida. Here, 22 of the 30 qualifying NBA franchises were invited to participate in placement games to determine the playoff seeding. Extra precautions were taken to avoid contamination or spread of COVID-19, such as enforced use of face masks off-court. No fans were allowed to view the games in-person, a rule that may extend into the 2020–21 season as well.

The NBA wasn’t the first league to exercise new regulations in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic — the 2020 MLB season, for example, was delayed until July and shortened to just 60 games as opposed to the atypical 162. However, it seems to have set the standard for how sports leagues at all levels should handle their programs in the midst of a pandemic:

Panic! Panic, panic, and more panic, with healthy doses of authoritarianism to boot!

Yes, friends, you and I are no strangers to this virus. You know it as an imaginary threat, conjured up internationally and bolstered by the fearmongering of leftist media in order to push an agenda, meddle with our election, and put an end to innocent small businesses to further invoke monopolization. I, on the other hand, know it as a ghoul – a twisted, gnarled ghoul hellbent on analyzing the joy and harmless entertainment the culture of sports brings into our world, and stripping that joy from our grasp.

I could, with much dread, stomach the gradual takedown of sports at the professional level. I contorted my mind to try and dwell on an upside, ANY upside, that may come from this putrid virus’s meddling. Baseball? The sport’s a little tiresome, maybe some experimentation is in order. Basketball? Never cared for it, too much pandering to Marxist causes and entitled celebrities. Soccer and hockey were barely American sports to begin with – who needs ’em?

But then the other shoe fell. The good, clean, red-blooded American wholesomeness of our college sports has been tainted, ruined by this overembellished plague.

I was like you – in complete and utter shock, followed by unyielding disgust. How could the NCAA betray American values like this? So many starry-eyed young athletes, having their chance to mold their futures in sports torn from their hands. The spectacles that come from this season must be forced, like many of us civilians, to be accompanied with flimsy face masks. The brave young men of college football must perform touchdown dances in empty stadiums, to the eerie, electronic blare of simulated crowd noise. That is, if they’re not unjustly sidelined due to contracting the sniffles.

Something has to be done, and it has to be done soon. I refuse to have the entirety of college sports in Fall ’20 and Spring ’21 played with its panties in a bunch. It was this line of thinking that led me to a brilliant solution, a conclusion so adverse to the panic-inducing agenda of the MSM that, without a doubt, it must be the perfect plan of action.

Hear me out. Why don’t we, as an American public deprived of our college sports… give all college-level athletes COVID-19?

Those of you whose minds have been addled by all the fearmongering may be clutching your pearls, stammering oppositions to this proposal. “B-But it’s n-n-not safe! Our k-kids will be infected! Th-Th-That isn’t what CNN w-wants!” And all your other cowardly protests. But those of you with rational, delusion-free minds should be stroking your chins, reading further into the underlying genius of this plan.

Those of you who understand what a mathematical proof is also understand the “if [blank] then [blank]” rule that applies to all factual knowledge. If an apple falls from a tree, then the tree must be an apple tree. If the milk tastes bad, then the milk must be expired. So, if all the student athletes in NCAA programs have COVID-19, then none of the athletes are at risk of contracting it!

I can hear your complaints, and I’ve developed flawless answers for each one. 

“But doesn’t that put kids’ lives at risk?”

Yeah, right, like colleges will let any of their athletes kick the bucket anytime soon. No, all the kids will just spend a couple days in their apartments and wash their hands, maybe get a check-up from some on-campus nurse every now and then, and they’ll be right as rain! It’s harder to die from a flu than to survive it, anyway – and there’s no way the body of an athletic young adult is gonna lose to a fever and a cough.

“But doesn’t that affect all the other students?”

Last time I checked, the only “other students” that hung out with athletes are OTHER ATHLETES. There’s no way some pre-med geek is spending time with the starting point guard for the Blue Devils, or that the Lady Bears’ volleyball team is rubbing shoulders with computer science undergrads. Come back when you have a valid objection… Liberal.

“But isn’t this illegal?”

Contrary to what the radical left might be filling your ears with, it is NOT illegal to catch a cold. I’m sure some pencil-neck somewhere will be crying about the mass-contamination of student athletes with a top-priority disease, but his squeals are undoubtedly dwarfed by the voices of the civilians starved of their dose of college athletics.

“But… but…”

That’s right. You’ve got nothing else to whine about, don’t you?… Liberal.

America needs its March Madness back, without the so-called health crisis in the air, and it’s not going to get it by following public safety guidelines and obeying the National Institutes of Health. It’ll take a couple weeks or so of throwing away face masks, shaking unwashed hands, swapping spit with transfer students – whatever they have to do to catch it – but once all college athletes survive the virus, we’ll have the dark cloud of risks and cautions banished from over our heads! Those kids can march onto their fields and courts focused on game plans and team chemistry, not worrying about some over embellished flu jeopardizing their season. And we, the American people, will finally be able to kick back on the sofa, grab some snacks, and enjoy some stress-free college football.

No more lockdowns – only touchdowns. That’s the American way.