The NCAA's worst nightmare is becoming a reality: An organized revolt by football players at big-time schools to end the long-established collective exploitation of  athletes.

The argument could be made that the revolt couldn't have been more poorly timed, when a pandemic threatens to wipe out a season of the cash cow of football. The response: The NCAA has had 114 years to reform itself, encouraged by many inside and outside to do so. It whiffed.

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John Fogerty's Centerfield is as ubiquitous and celebratory a song as there is in the audio armory of sports-venue music. It was the first thing up Friday on T-Mobile Park's video screen as the Mariners tried to navigate a home-opening "ceremony" in the bizarro-world of operating big-league sports in the middle of a bigger-league global catastrophe.

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The Pac-12 Conference produced Friday its best shot at a 2020 football schedule, virtually daring the coronavirus to do its worst. So far in the U.S., it has done that very well.

Unless some drastic changes occur in federal leadership and public behavior, it won't be played. But, like a miracle, maybe COVID-19 will disappear.

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However controversial was his departure from the New York Jets, Jamal Adams was so eager for a good impression in Seattle Thursday that he made his bed. In his hotel room.

In today's world of Zoom, backgrounds leave a mark.

"I'm very particular as far as my details," he said. "I want to hit it on the nose."

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All NFL teams have officially begun their training camps, although drone cameras above the fields would show little evidence, except for more cars in the lots. For most of the first week, players and coaches are mostly inside, getting tested for COVID-19 and having meetings. The first contact practices aren't until mid-August, and the exhibition season has been cancelled.

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If you've watched some telecasts of games in MLB's stubby start-up season, you may have seen something you didn't expect.  High-fives. Hugs. Spitting. Close contact.

You know, like it was in the before days, when baseball players celebrated all over each other as if style points were available whenever a teammate did something more than foul a ball off his instep.

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Two days after Seattle sports went Kraken, it beheld a football Krakatoa.

In giving up well-regarded SS Bradley McDougald and two first-round picks to the New York Jets Saturday, the Seahawks blew up a big chunk of their future for SS Jamal Adams, a truculent first-team All-Pro safety who could be gone in two years.

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Before the opening game of the 2020 irregular season Friday in Houston, Scott Servais sounded more like he was at the end of something instead of the beginning.

"I wasn't sure," the Mariners manager said, "we'd ever get here."

The major league baseball season, in jeopardy since mid-March not only by a pandemic but by the industry's penchant to self-destruct over money, finally lurched to its feet this week. But the degree of difficulty left Servais a little drawn.

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Much has been said about the pending weirdness of a Major League Baseball season missing 102 games and devoid of spectators, yet filled with nearly as many hygiene rules as a hospital surgery unit.

All true. But in the before days (pre-pandemic), does anyone remember 2019?

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Let's deep-six right now the complaints about naming a sports team after a mythical being. We have plenty of Giants, Titans, Devils, Thunderbirds, etc. In the land that propagated Bigfoot propaganda for profit, let us Sasquatologists not heap scorn on Kraken.

Hey, we once had an NBA team named after an airplane that never came to exist, the Boeing Super Sonic Transport (SST).

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Some issues remain undecided, but it seems as if players negotiating with the NFL about the start of the season have succeeded in leveraging the pandemic to eliminate a blight upon the heartland.

There will be no exhibition football games in 2020.

The public-health disaster and its subsequent restrictions preclude a proper national celebration. That doesn't mean you can't throw glitter and yell hosannas at someone six feet away.

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From a summer sports perspective, about the only sliver of virtue accruing from the coronavirus shutdown is that Seattle would be spared the onslaught of Canadian fans pouring in for the annual visit of the Toronto Blue Jays. Besides cheering for the national team, they had a secondary goal of rendering inert all those stereotypes of Canadians being polite, courteous and deferential.

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Jen Cohen is about as earnest, enthusiastic and successful an athletics director as there is in the ruthless world of big-time college sports. As a Tacoma kid, she grew up enthralled by University of Washington sports. Since her 2016 appointment to succeed Scott Woodward as athletics director, she's been in her dream job.

So as you can imagine, the last seven months for her have been an unyielding nightmare.

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My favorite descriptor of our neighbors to the north is that Canada is the law office above a good party bar.

Well, the party seems over, for a good long while, anyway.

"Knock-knock, Canada. It's us, America. Some trouble down here. We, um, need a place to crash. Got a couch? Yes, yes, we're wearing masks. Mostly. Some."

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The thresher of the coronavirus continues to make hay of optimistic sports schedules. The Pac-12 Conference Friday followed the Big Ten Conference's lead and made the football schedules conference-only, meaning that Washington's September games against Sacramento State and Utah State joined Michigan on the discard pile.

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The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

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Since 1938, Seattle University's athletic mascot was the Chieftains. Until 2000, when the school's president, Rev. Stephen Sundborg, helped lead the change to Redhawks. To the scoffers who eye-rolled at the political correctness, Sundborg offered a simple retort.

"The whole purpose of a mascot is to unite people," he said at the time. "If it offends people, what's the purpose?"

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For what it's worth, the Mariners have been told they are booked to start their 60-game schedule of a most irregular season at 6:10 p.m. PT Friday, July 24 against the defending American League champion Astros in Houston, a city whose area hospitals nearly have reached capacity with the overload of coronavirus cases.

By July 24, maybe covid-19 will have disappeared by then, you know, like a miracle.

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Summer camp was as stilted as spring training was casual. Nobody wanted to catch viral cooties, but what's a batting cage for but to hang out, shoulder to shoulder? How can you tell if your clubhouse prank worked if you can't see a whole face full of anguish? And where's the party if there's no condo pool?

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Those darn college kids. Don't they know their near-constant desires to get drunk and laid are in the way of the entire purpose of universities, which is to stage college football?

Life is full of hard decisions, kids. You can't always get what you want, wrote Mick Jagger wrote a couple of generations ago. But if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

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