STARKVILLE — Oh how the times have changed.
Sure, we’ve heard this saying before. I’ll concede it’s cliche. But we live in wildly different times than those just a year ago in which I wandered through the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Birmingham-Wynfrey Hotel only to be greeted by a slew of fans from around the Southeastern Conference — the most noticeable of whom dons a massive national championship ring fashioned as a hat to match his head-to-toe Alabama garb.
One year ago this week, the towering hotel in Hoover hosted SEC Media Days — an annual event in which every football coach from around the conference and a handful of their brightest stars join together for four days of laughs, interviews and general discussion of the upcoming football season.
Oh how the times have changed.
Rather than gathering for the writing, reporting, networking and beer drinking that sports writers around the conference so enjoy at the annual escape, we are trapped inside. Rather than Joe Moorhead or Matt Luke guiding the Bulldogs and Rebels into their respective fall camps, we’re living in a world in which a certain player’s decision to imitate a dog urinating has sent Mike Leach and Lane Kiffin to Starkville and Oxford, respectively. Rather than prognosticating on matchups between MSU and N.C. State in week two, we’re holding our collective breath to see if there is football at all this fall.
Oh how the times have changed.
Today I sit at the bartop in my one-bedroom apartment in Starkville and click-clack away at this column unsure of what the days ahead will bring. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to run rampant throughout our country. A contentious presidential election is slated to endure come November. I’m not sure what I’m going to make for dinner tomorrow night.
OK, one of those three things matters a hell of a lot less than the others, but you get my point. We live in a world where each day is an uncertain; a world in which the usual escapes of sports, or for us college football writers, SEC Media Days, have been stripped away due to a disease whose magnitude hasn’t been mirrored since the influenza outbreak of 1918.
At this moment, there’s a litany of things I’d rather be doing than flipping on Netflix for the umteenth night in a row as I slog through the selections again unsure if I want to watch anything at all.
I’d rather be seated in rows upon rows of sports writers, radio voices and sports media personalities alike listening to Jimbo Fisher’s wickedly fast banter, or a string of non-answer, generic responses from Nick Saban. I’d rather be hunched over in laughter alongside my journalist-brethren as SEC Media Days staple Bob Holt of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette tells former Missouri coach Barry Odom he wished he made as much money as he did like last summer. I’d rather be heading to the usual Hoover dive bar reporters congregate at each summer for SEC Media Days and during the spring at the SEC Baseball Tournament for cold beers as we peer through hazy cigarette smoke to make out which famed stenographer is karaoking to Frank Sinatra and — much to everyone’s surprise — does a damn good job of it.
Oh how the times have changed.
I’m not sure what tomorrow, this week or the next month will bring us. In short, I hope we find a sense of normalcy. I hope we find a vaccine for this damned disease that has killed and harmed so many in this country and across the globe. I hope someday soon we’re all gathered at a hotel in Hoover or Davis Wade Stadium, arguing about whether Mike Leach and Lane Kiffin hate each other enough to really appreciate the Egg Bowl rivalry.
But in the meantime, wear a mask. Help your fellow neighbor. Look out for one another. If we attack this disease that took away this year’s SEC Media Days and so many more important events and lives in the same unifying way we cheer for the Bulldogs and Rebels, Crimson Tide and Tigers, we may find ourselves back to the lives we now yearn for.
Oh how the times have changed.
Ben Portnoy reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @bportnoy15.
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