Thanks to ESPN, College basketball goes on in full stadiums as Covid cancels college classes
January 24, 2022
While critics rightly slam the Michigan State University administration for canceling in-person teaching while hosting full sports stadiums, no one is holding accountable the vast media apparatus that enables liberals to act as if we are in a Covid crisis — up until their sports revenues are at stake.
When money is on the table, the media takes that money, no matter their professed beliefs.
ESPN, the largest collegiate sports broadcaster, is notorious for its permissive attitude about mixing sports and politics — as long as it doesn’t interfere with profits.
A good example of this hypocrisy is ESPN’s Mina Kimes, an NFL analyst, who blamed Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers last weekend for prolonging the pandemic because he chose not to get vaccinated.
“He [Rodgers] can say whatever he wants,” Kimes said on Twitter, “and people are free to criticize him — especially when he’s using his massive platform to perpetuate the sort of misinformation that’s prolongated a deadly pandemic.”
Rodgers, along with the Michigan State basketball team, and all other professional and collegiate big-money athletes, have been in severe testing regimes for nearly two years that make it unlikely that individually they have infected a lot of other people with Covid.
It’s much more likely, if you follow the “science” of the Kimes-type liberals who have platforms larger than Aaron Rodgers, that the packed stadiums which ESPN and all the other alphabet networks happily televise, where fans scream and cheer for their favorite team, are spreading the virus more than are the individual players.
As ESPN itself noted when asking if stadiums were safe: “Six out of the seven public health experts that KHN [Kaiser Health Network] spoke to from big football states were adamant in their response: No way. Not now.”
And that was before the more contagious Omicron variant dominated.
So, where is ESPN’s or Mina Kimes’ or Max Kellerman’s — or those of any of the other liberals who work at ESPN — concern about full stadiums?
About $2 million was paid by the NCAA to Michigan State this year from money paid to the collegiate governing body by ESPN, with like payments in every other year until 2023-2024.
Additionally, Michigan State was paid $45 million directly when it sold media rights to broadcasters for individual games rights this season.
ESPN is undoubtedly the biggest broadcaster in college basketball, featuring three-to-six games per night on its various cable channels, including games played by Michigan State.
And in fact, ESPN is probably the largest beneficiary of the decision to have stadiums full of fans at Michigan State.
If lives are at stake from a mass Covid contagion, it’s certainly not the players or the fans who benefit from the decision to have packed stadiums.
If you believe the Covid “science” that liberals like Kimes espouse, the money that broadcasters would lose if colleges didn’t play those games is likely one of the main reasons, if not the only reason, that Michigan State is playing basketball games right now in a stadium full of fans while in-person classes are canceled.