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It's at 1115 Broadway, across from the Kellogg Eye Center, so you can get some eyedrops at the same time. [Ed: please do not go to the hospital and ask for eyedrops.] First time customers can light up a free pre roll. 21+ please.

Corona chronicles. How it's going:

• Missouri-Vandy and Florida-LSU are postponed after outbreaks. They've bumped those games to the open week the SEC implemented before the championship game. Next week's Mizzou-Florida game is in serious doubt since you're supposed to isolate for ten days after a positive test.
• Ole Miss is having an outbreak but "could play" as of yesterday.
• Baylor-OSU is postponed after an outbreak at Baylor is blamed on a false negative. An infected person was tested, test threw up a false negative, and then everyone got on a plane. The supposed false negative is from a point-of-contact antigen test. Yikes.
• FAU-USM is also postponed.
• Nick Saban and Alabama AD Greg Byrne both tested positive. Saban joins Mike Norvell, Les Miles, and Kevin Sumlin as P5 head coaches who have tested positive.
• Nebraska announced a free watch party at their basketball arena, and then immediately canceled it. We do not have to revisit our "dumbest way to get coronavirus" gimmicky top five. "Watching Nebraska get hammered by 50 points" was an easy #1 otherwise.
• CUSA pushed back its title game to December 18th in an effort to get games in.

Saban getting infected is alarming for the Big Ten's prospects. Alabama is Alabama and has been administering daily tests. Saban himself has taken every reasonable precaution. Also alarming: Baylor is using those quick point of contact tests and one false negative blew it all up. Baylor's opsec was insufficient, perhaps inevitably:

Rhoades said his team was "really spaced out well" on the team flight and bus rides and was compliant in wearing masks and goggles in transit. He speculated that spread could have occurred during team dinner the night before the Oct. 3 game or in the visiting locker room at West Virginia's Milan Puskar Stadium, citing "very cramped quarters." Most visiting college football locker rooms are smaller than the home teams' locker rooms.

It is very easy to see this happening in the Big Ten, at which point that team will likely be cancelling three games.

[After THE JUMP: nobody's watching anyway]

Quote from man stabbed. Seven years later, an incredible story arising from the Michigan-Louisville national title game:

The best part was it was a fight over the game. The stabber was a Michigan fan. The stabbed was a Louisville fan. Walked up to the stabbed guy and the first thing he said to me was “I can’t believe I let that mother ****er stab me.”

— Anthony (@FireHarvard) October 15, 2020

My alibi is that I was in the arena at the time, only wishing I could stab someone.

Nobody is watching the sports. It's carnage out there:

Here is what sports viewership looks like right now: pic.twitter.com/JzbKn1pKIz

— Sports Media Watch (@paulsen_smw) October 14, 2020

There's no one reason sports viewing has dropped off a cliff. It's a combination of many things. This Yahoo article seems to get things exactly backwards:

Activism? Election? Pandemic challenges? New Marist poll suggests none of them are causing sports' TV ratings decline

No, the increased political activism in professional sports doesn’t explain the ratings decline.

And no, the sports where that activism is the most pronounced, like the NBA, haven’t suffered more in comparison.

The presidential election isn’t distracting people from sports.

The changes to the rules and viewer experience during the pandemic have not, in fact, caused people to tune out, either.

It's not "none of the above." It's all of the above. Then this article relates the results from the poll, which clearly state that all of these things have affected some portion of the survey respondents:

64 percent of respondents said the election hadn’t influenced their sports viewing. … The rule changes, most noticeably in baseball, and lack of live fans weren’t a major factor either. More than seven in 10 fans said those were inconsequential.

Put another way, 36% of respondents said the election had influenced their sports viewing and ~30% said rules changes and the weird atmosphere were a factor. Even if there's significant overlap between those two groups—I'm in both—that explains a hell of a lot of the decline in ratings, and then everything happening all at once gets you most of the rest of the way.

Rehashing a 20-year-old loss is on brand. The Athletic has an oral history of That Northwestern Game, which is the exact moment when spread-to-run became the new paradigm. David Terrell: 

David Terrell (Michigan wide receiver): We knew it was going to be a fight as every game is, but who fucking knew we were gonna have to score 50 points to just try to keep a win?

It still stings when people say the things, sometimes.

Danielson: I don’t think Michigan made any changes in defense at all. They lined up the way they used to line up. They didn’t put anybody over the slots. They gave Zak a lot of easy throws. I was just like, “Whoa, they didn’t really prepare for this game at all.”

Not so much because this one Northwestern game was devastating but because Michigan did not learn nearly fast enough from it, despite being the ones getting immolated. That slowness to adapt is the main reason the Big Ten went from Big Two, Little X to OSU dominion.

Four-year Piesman run upcoming. Iowa State has a commit from a QB/DT. Yes. Yes they do:

Meet Howard Brown, a 6'2" 275 lb QB/DT combo.

Committed to @CycloneFB, Brown has thrown for over 6,000 yards and 82 TDs pic.twitter.com/Zobk7eRuME

— RADIO.COM Sports (@RDCSports) October 14, 2020

Never let it be said that there is not beauty in this world.

A very hockey solution. CUSA's attempting to reduce travel and has stumbled on the hockey way to do things:

Sources: Conference-USA has voted in favor of having its teams play two regular season games against the same opponent in the same location each week during the 20-21 season. Games will be on Thursdays and Saturdays.

— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) October 13, 2020

That'll also give them four days between the Saturday game and the next week to catch any transmissions. Commenters are outraged that you might have to spend four days in El Paso. At least it's not Lubbock?

The worst tournament in sports, continued. The NCAA hockey tournament has announced regional sites through 2026. There is a regional in Toledo. The other "Midwest" regionals: Allentown, PA; Allentown, PA; Maryland Heights, MO; Allentown, PA; Sioux Falls, SD.

At some point some of this falls on Michigan, which should be bidding in Toledo annually. The Toledo bid that did succeed was sponsored by BGSU. But also: when that regional happens it will be a decade since there was a regional in Indiana/Ohio/Michigan, which have almost a quarter of D-1 programs. Incredible.

Etc.: Michigan is a 2.5 point underdog at Minnesota. Quit selling guys, Dortmund. If you bet on "Greek system COVID outbreak" please collect your 35 cents. The Sklars interact with Juwan Howard back when both were students. More details on Mustapha Muhammad's abrupt departure from Michigan.