This morning I listened to Kevin Warren, Big 10 commissioner, explain in a press conference that he was cancelling the B1G conference basketball tournament.  He spent 13 minutes repeating how important is to ‘show leadership’, ‘do the right thing’ and that he ‘talked to a lot of people’, without elaborating on any of what that means.

He used the term ‘fiduciary responsibility’ about half a dozen times.  I’ll save you the time and trouble of looking in up in Collin’s dictionary:

fiduciary 

ADJECTIVE

designating or of a person who holds something in trust for another; of a trustee or trusteeship

a fiduciary guardian for a minor child

Gosh who’s gonna argue with ‘doing the right thing’?  Especially when it’s ‘crystal clear’, and part of your fiduciary responsibility?  But nothing in these phrases indicate he even understood the factors in play, much less how to weigh them.

When a reporter asked what had changed to make him decide to cancel the tournament, he replied with “I don’t think anything changed,”

Huh?  Something changed Kevin, an hour ago we were going to play a 4 day basketball tournament and now we aren’t.  Please tell us you don’t make decisions like this based on how your morning coffee is settling.  My guess is that Kevin had just been notified that in a few hours the NCAA would announce cancellation of the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, so there would be no big dance for the B1G tournament winner to attend.  Which means conference commissioners had a brief window in which to take the stage and look principled.   Kudos to the Commish for grabbing his glimpse of the PR spotlight before getting upstaged by the NCAA.

But noticeably absent from his press conferences was any quotes from the CDC or WHO, no statistics, no worse case scenarios about what might happen if the tournament went on as planned.  Maybe cancelling the tournament was the right thing.  But if so, it should be easy to defend in public statement without overworking the weasel-phrase generator.  Simply saying with conviction that ‘we want to do the right thing’ and that it’s ‘crystal clear’ doesn’t absolve anyone of acknowledging the costs and consequences of their actions.

Here’s some questions I wish journalists would have had the courage to ask:

• Commissioner, what specific data from the CDC or other health departments convinced you that holding the B1G tournament was a risk was too great to take, and why was it OK to play yesterday’s games but not the rest?

• Commissioner, the student athletes – the ones you said this decision is all about – came to these schools to compete and this tournament was the last chance for many of them to play organized basketball at a national level. Do you think they feel robbed of their opportunity because you are panicking about what you don’t know?

• Commissioner, have you considered the hundreds of part-time workers who won’t get B1G paychecks – ticket takers, concession stand workers, security people, ushers, maintenance people, janitors, Uber/Lyft drivers – because you are ‘doing the right thing’? These aren’t CEOs or spoiled professional athletes, these are people working 2 jobs to try to pay the rent, single moms putting food on the table, college kids paying for books…  did you take into account your ‘fiduciary responsibility’ to them when weighing  the hypothetical risk of holding the events as scheduled?”

• Commissioner, what specifically makes you believe we will ever be able to have public NCAA events in the future – won’t there always be a threat when you have thousands of people in an arena? How is the situation unique this year and how will you know when it’s safe to resume conference play?

Tough questions, but being a major conference commissioner comes with big responsibilities.  All the stakeholders deserve to know that their interests were given due consideration.

But let’s be real – life will go on without the B1G Tournament, and despite hardships felt by those workers immediately affected the financial impact won’t cripple the greater economy.

But the bandwagon affect has been scary to watch.

Public gatherings are being canceled at unprecedented rates – school events, college classes, reunions, St Patrick day festivals, corporate meetings, rallies, church services..  all of the announcements I’ve seen are sparse on the details, and they all seem to feel it’s safe to say something vague about ‘abundance of caution’.   Apparently the socially acceptable response to these announcements is to stand and offer a polite golf clap to the courage and leadership it took to reach such a bold and difficult decision.

Let me be clear – I don’t envy anyone in the position of having to decide whether to cancel a public event.  And I don’t minimize the tradeoffs they have to weigh, especially with so much still unknown about Covad-19. I’m not even really that upset with Commissioner Warren.  I’ll say it again, maybe cancelling sporting events is the right thing to do right now.

But we are witnessing an insidious force that extends far beyond Covad-19:  The sweeping and unchecked power that can be wielded over our economy and lifestyles by getting the right powerful people to say the magic words “abundance of caution”. It’s almost like shouting ‘Expelliarmus’ and watching the dark forces of skepticism vanquished before your eyes.   Imagine if someone figured out how to manipulate this power for their own, more directed purposes?

Indulge me for a moment:

Here’s a site listing some of the church shootings in the US since 2012.  No one can dispute the tragedy of each case, people died.  Suppose some threats were to materialize against people of a certain congregation or denomination.  Is it so hard to imagine local or county officials urging people of faith to stop having public gatherings out of ‘an abundance of caution’?  Should we all stand and golf clap at their bravery as we cancel church?

Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos all had their approved speaking appearances at UC Berkeley abruptly cancelled by campus police due to ‘an abundance of caution’ over protest threats. They didn’t get their legally afforded opportunity for free speech, but we should say thanks to campus police for keeping us safe?

Is it hard for anyone to imagine the Democratic National Committee cancelling the rest of the 2020 primaries and awarding the nomination to Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders out of ‘an abundance of caution’ that crowds and campaigning will spread coronavirus?  Should Bernie supporters just take another one for the team?

On 9-11, Al-Qaeda and all of their global sympathizers celebrated the crash of the twin towers and the Pentagon, which were symbolic targets of American financial and military power.  They rejoiced that three thousand Americans were killed, but the enduring legacy was the damage done to the US economy and disruption to our way of life.  Such is the goal of terrorism – make people feel unsafe, lose faith in their institutions and leadership, and alter their way of life.  Somewhere in the world today, two terrorist are communicating with each other in coded messages:  Omar:  forget the plutonium, all we need is a new strain of the flu.  We visit a few airports, train stations and shopping malls and let ‘abundance of caution’ bring the Great Satan to its knees! We’ve been working too hard all these years!

Here’s a thought:   Let’s take that $50B allocated to combat Covad-19 and issue level 4 hazmat suits to every person in America, and make it immediately mandatory that they wear it in public from this day forward.  If you’re not on board with this, then spend some time thinking about how/where/when we should define the boundaries for the ‘abundance of caution’.

With any decision you get all the data you can, weigh your options, weigh the consequences and costs of being right and wrong about each, and then make a move.  Sometimes abundance of caution is the best route because the costs of being wrong are so severe.  And maybe that’s what’s going on today with Covad-19.   But are right to demand that the data is really being gathered, the costs are really weighed, and our leaders are considering all of our best interests and not those that are trending best on social media.

Journalists need to be reminded that it’s not rude or crass to ask leaders to prove that they have done their homework before they impose the burdens of their decisions on us.  It’s OK to challenge ‘abundance of caution’.

We don’t have to golf clap on cue at every press conference.