Ferd Lewis: Mountain West Conference makes the best decision for its athletes in canceling football in 2020

Last Wednesday, the Mountain West Conference trumpeted the rollout of its “adjusted” football schedule as providing “a path forward” for the 2020 season.

On Monday, the conference suddenly whipped a 180-degree turn in its virtual board room and announced the “indefinite postponement” of all fall sports that will leave the University of Hawaii without a fall varsity football season for the first time since 1961.

What happened in the course of the five days to shake the MWC to its senses?

Quite literally, we’re told, it was a heart issue that contributed to the change of heart, if not directly putting the long-avoided option of postponement over the top.

After trying for the better part of nearly five months to find an avenue to go ahead with a football season, the MWC’s Board of Directors made the safe and sane call and pulled the plug on all its fall sports Monday causing whiplash in many of its followers in the process.

Most likely it was the preponderance of issues, very few of which favored pressing on amid a pandemic, where we are still learning about the potential lingering impact of the virus.

“The presidents (who make up the 12-member Board of Directors) really started to focus on all the news that came out last week on the impact of the virus on the heart, so that was a key factor,” said a person familiar with the process but not authorized to comment to the media.

Reports about how COVID-19-related myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, had been found in a number of Big Ten athletes set off alarm bells far beyond the Midwest.

One of the athletes, Brady Feeny, an Indiana offensive lineman, and his family have been in the forefront of raising awareness of the virus’ affects. Feeny tweeted, “I never thought that I would have serious health complications from this virus, but look at what happened.”

They were disturbing enough to help prompt the Mid-American Conference to become the first NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision conference to cancel its fall season on Saturday. Enough also to bring the issue to the table and start the Big Ten and Pac-12 leaning that way over the weekend. They could opt out of the fall as soon as today.

MWC discussion was also energized over the weekend to the point that when directors convened Monday it is said they had already reached a consensus.

In this climate of college athletes unifying to assert their rights, woe be the conference that opens itself up to COVID-19 liability issues.

Not that the presidents, especially in the MWC, had to look very far for a stack of reasons to signal a halt to football.

In the past week New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham re-applied pressure on that state’s schools to forego fall football and California Governor Gavin Newsome issued a 34-page manual of guidelines for resuming college athletics in the pandemic.

And, as UH President David Lassner noted, “I would say certainly in Hawaii our situation is considerably worse (than it had been).”

Add it all up — morally, legally, financially and otherwise — and you figure it finally got to the tipping point. A place where the MWC’s Board of Directors decided saving an already cursed fall football season had long since become more trouble than it was worth.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.