WITH SPORTS REDUCED TO COVID WHACK-A-MOLE, WILL YOU WATCH?

If leagues are committed to living with coronavirus, the resulting daily tumult and competitive sham — scrubs replacing superstars, diluted entertainment value — could chase away smart fans

     This is not the time to be gullible, to fall prey to Christmas music, to be softened by one's love for sports and addiction to gambling. This is a time to realize Big Sports is protecting its $600 billion business and that anything league officials say about COVID-19 is self-serving propaganda.

     Lie-soaked eggnog, actually.

     They do not care about health and safety. They do not care about competitive integrity, consumer rights. Their every thought, breath and twitch is dedicated toward making sure the games go on, making sure enough bodies constitute two teams, making sure you keep watching, making sure you keep wagering, making sure the broadcast networks have their regularly scheduled inventory, making sure advertisers keep spending — and making sure their golden bottom line is fed, no matter how unethical and clumsy it all is.

     For every heartwarming story — the Indianapolis Colts winning for each other, praying for center Ryan Kelly and his wife after they lost a baby girl, a "Hard Knocks'' worth binging — there is relentless, COVID-survivalist filler. It's no longer about which team is better. Mostly, the outcome depends on which team is less impacted by the coronavirus, and with Big C settling in for the long term, logistical chaos undeniably is the new abnormal — a constant diet of breakthrough infections and outbreaks, scrubs replacing stars, ragged performances, lopsided games, tanking teams, low-grade content for your hard-earned money.

    Big Sports marches on in pretend mode nonetheless, as if nothing is wrong with 13 NBA teams having at least five players in protocols. Or nothing is wrong when almost every NFL game is ravaged by COVID fallout. Or nothing is wrong with 5-7 Rutgers playing in a New Year's Eve bowl game. Or nothing is wrong if Aaron Rodgers, Kyrie Irving and Cole Beasley suit up as anti-vaxxers who easily could spread the Omicron variant. Or nothing is wrong if Novak Djokovic, seeking tennis history, is granted a medical exemption from vaccine requirements by a desperate Australian Open.

     They could pause seasons for weeks or months and put themselves — and the rest of us — out of misery. They won't. There is too much money to be made by billionaire owners, mostly old white men and their media enablers, who don't realize how a diluted product ultimately might chase away the fans they're trying to keep.

     At some point, leagues should be begging for your mercy, promising refunds and givebacks to ticket-buyers. But they're trying to sneak the pandemic past you, refusing to acknowledge that sports has become a Whack-a-mole game designed only to keep a money machine whirring. You're just another pawn in the game.

     They do not care if the entertainment value is watered down. They do not care if you feel gypped in your stadium and arena seats. They do not care who wins a championship. They do not care that the NFL's reserve/COVID-19 lists continue to be 24/7 turnstiles, that there seemingly are more players in the NBA's protocols than those available to compete. At least the NHL had the good sense to shut down for a while. At least the College Football Playoff has a backbone, threatening forfeitures if teams don't take appropriate precautions before next Friday's semifinal games — and prepared to vacate the national championship if all four qualifiers are too decimated to play.

     But the NFL and NBA are fully immersed in deception. Though Roger Goodell and Adam Silver have no medical degrees, the commissioners have decided they know more about the virus — and the highly mutated Omicron — than public health authorities and career epidemiologists. The only certainty, as we enter Year Three, is uncertainty about what's next. Yet these two sports quacks think they know all about a disease that will continue to infect and kill people, strain hospitals and leave untold numbers with lasting effects of long-haul COVID. The NFL has decided asymptomatic players can't spread the coronavirus and won't be tested — tantamount to medical fraud. The NBA is about to assume the same stance and, for those who do test positive, the isolation period will be reduced from 10 days to six days. Legitimate doctors say it's still uncertain how long an infected person remains infectious, and seeing how Omicron is much more contagious than other variants, it makes little sense to ease up on protocol measures.

     At this rate, Big Sports won't test at all and just let everyone make each other sick — starting with the anti-vaxxers — which smacks of a dystopian, corporate-controlled existence that could have been hatched in a movie studio.

     "Frankly, we are having trouble coming up with what the logic would be behind pausing right now,” Silver said. "It seems for us that the right and responsible thing to do, taking all the factors into consideration, is to continue to play. As we look through these cases literally ripping through the country, let alone the rest of the world, I think we're finding ourselves where we sort of knew we were going to get to over the past several months, and that is this virus will not be eradicated, and we're going to have to learn to live with it.''

    "(O)micron,'' Goodell wrote in a letter to NFL teams, "appears to be a very different illness from the one that we first confronted in the spring of 2020.''

     Those are, in effect, conspiracies. Conveniently, America's two most prominent leagues have decided to give up fighting the disease, in the interest of flowing revenue streams, at a time when both are served by pushing full-blast ahead. The NFL is entering a seven-week bonanza of traditionally big TV windows, capped by the conference title games and Super Bowl LVI in Hollywood, at its $6 billion SoFi Stadium showcase. The NBA, struggling with attendance and early-season indifference, couldn't afford to scrap a traditional Christmas Day programming blitz worth more than $35 million in ad revenue. Ten top brands will launch during the five-game pileup among a roster of 48 sponsors. So forget about a league's responsibilities to a public that enables the bottom line.

     Forget about trying to slow the spread of COVID-19, they say, preferring to dismiss the reality that anyone — from those fully vaccinated and boostered to unvaccinated COVID-iots — can be infected by Omicron and spread it to others on a team and within their families and communities. Dr. Goodell and Dr. Silver are convinced COVID-positive personnel without symptoms can keep playing without quarantining, though health experts say vaccinated people without booster shots are vulnerable to Omicron infections. Such is the tightly kept secret in sports: Leagues claim large percentages of players are vaccinated — but don't say how many have boosters. How can officials make reckless assumptions? You know the answer.

     "We do think there’s an opportunity to potentially lead here,” Silver told ESPN. "We have the advantage that we have a highly vaccinated group. … Maybe we can demonstrate that there’s a way that people can move forward, again recognizing that this virus, unfortunately, isn’t going anywhere and it’s just going to become a part of our lives for the foreseeable future.''

     How dare he suggest that his self-interests would determine how the rest of us view COVID. In that vein, Silver has piggybacked the lead of the NFL, whose chief medical officer has doubled down. Said Dr. Allen Sills: "We have not really seen this phenomenon that people have discussed, which is asymptomatic people in the facility spreading the virus to others. As we've gone back and looked throughout the entire season, what we've seen consistently is that when people have symptoms, that's when they seem to be contagious to others. And that's why we're asking people to come forward and acknowledge symptoms because that's the point at which they're vulnerable and the point at which they expose themselves to others. Our data has been consistent of that throughout the season, and I think it's particularly true of this new variant, with Omicron, of what we're seeing.''

     Omicron emerged just a short time ago. Isn't it disingenuous of Sills to suddenly make sweeping judgments amid the daily churn of positive tests? The NFL is the same lie factory, remember, that used its doctors to try and hoodwink through a concussion crisis.

     And the NBA? As the Brooklyn Nets and 16-17 Los Angeles Lakers were cutting and pasting rosters so their Christmas show can proceed — no Kevin Durant, maybe no James Harden, but plenty of G-League callups and a cigar-smoking LeBron James for your holiday enjoyment — a tweet from Karl-Anthony Towns brought timely perspective to the money grab. Last year, the Minnesota star lost his mother, one of seven family members who have died from COVID-19 complications. Now, after testing positive himself last season, Towns is one of six Timberwolves players in protocols.

     "Can’t catch a f*%@ing break!'' he wrote.

     All of which points to the bastardized, diminished condition of these piecemeal seasons. The NBA wants to paint wholesome stories about promoted G-Leaguers, but until Silver reduces the staggering cost of attending a game, he can't celebrate the comeback of 40-year-old Joe Johnson — who last played in the league four years ago — when Durant, Harden, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic and Trae Young have been among the COVID-missing. As we await rosters for Lakers-Nets, does Silver realize the average ticket price at newly renamed Crypto.com Center is almost $800 — which a G Leaguer couldn't afford at his $37,500 annual salary?

     Remember, you aren't required to watch any of this. You have the power, the remote control. But some people can't resist, such as the growing numbers of problem gamblers, an addiction rising substantially as legal sports betting expands to 30 states and the District of Columbia. Through October, $3.16 billion had been wagered on sports this year in this country — more than double the amount from the same period in 2020. Said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, in a Los Angeles Times interview: "Everyone who profits from sports betting — leagues, gambling companies, state and tribal government — should put some of that revenue back into preventing and treating gambling addiction.''

     Nah, Big Sports is too busy trying to milk the down-and-out addiction crowd for every last dollar.

     I think we all could appreciate, after two hellish years, the soothing powers of a great sports event. Next time you see one, please point it out. Until then, the announcers can stop shouting, the war music can stop playing and the pre-game shows can stop tub-thumping. What we're watching here is not big-time sports. At Gucci prices, with Chanel pomp and circumstance, we now are shopping at Walmart.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.