One of the things I’ve seen a lot of hand wringing about is that Medical Team A says it’s not safe to play and Medical Team B says it is, so we just can’t trust Medical folks..I think that’s a big oversimplification..Here’s why....

I’ve talked to a lot of medical pros throughout this nightmare and the one common theme is this: We don’t know enough to be sure about much of anything. What they are all dealing with is a set of probabilities..They can say what’s likely or unlikely, but not what is or isn’t...

But what fans ,politicians, and, in this case, leagues want is certainty. They want an answer .Should we play or not? But there is no right or wrong answer to that yet.What it comes down to is a level of risk tolerance ,which will vary depending on who’s asking the question..

The often used analogy is the bowl of M&M’s : 99 are delicious candy and chocolate. 1 is poison. Would u eat from that bowl? Of course not, because why risk your life over an M and M ?? But that’s not what we’re talking about here.The stakes are higher then candy.

So the question is more, there’s a bowl of lottery tickets: 99 get u 50 mil and 1 means u could get seriously ill or perhaps die. In that scenario, there will be some folks eager to take the risk and some who won’t..Neither are wrong..

But even beyond that, the calculation isn’t so clear cut. Some folks have advisors saying there’s actually 1,000 m and m’s in the bowl with only 1 bad one..others say it’s 500 others 250..None of them are wrong either because we simply don’t know for sure it’s a best guess.

In 2016 when 538 gave Hillary a 70 percent chance of winning, they didn’t say Hillary WILL win. They said it’s a strong probability, and if u were a betting man, that would of been the safe money.Turns out, she lost..Doesnt mean odds were wrong , just info isn’t perfect.

So what we’re dealing with here is leagues/schools telling medical professionals what their level of risk tolerance is, those medical pros are providing the best answer they can based on probabilities they forecast using info they have.

For the B1G and P12, that all added up to one decision. For the SEC ACC and B12 , another. But even those decisions aren’t etched in stone.With more time comes more info and thus more accurate forecasts and more refined risk assessments.

What happens when regular students return to campus? That’s been a HUGE question posed by folks I’ve talked to.We don’t know yet.How much does actually PLAYING increase risk. We’re just learning now. It’s a variable, and there are lots of them.

The long and Short of it is that CFB mirrors society: we can all agree the virus is bad,requires caution and brings risk.How best to address all that? Answers will vary, and that’s not a bad thing.But as humans, were not very comfortable with uncertainty.