How to Exist When History Stops

Living Without Sports In a World That Increasingly Feels Like a Simulation

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.

Several weeks ago, when it began to dawn on all of us that sports were about to vanish for the foreseeable future, I downloaded a distraction for my phone called “College Football Coach.” It is an uncluttered app, entirely devoid of graphics and actual gameplay; your role is to serve as a fictional coach at a fictional university whose objective is to coach up fictional players with randomly generated names, a disproportionate number of whom seem to hail from Alaska or Idaho. You recruit, you choose your offensive and defensive “styles,” and you play simulated games with the single tap of the screen in an attempt to rise up the career ladder at schools like “Manhattan” and “Southwest Kentucky”. If you are successful, you are offered jobs at more prestigious programs, like “Appalachian Tech”; if you fail, you will be unceremoniously fired, as I was after six seasons despite winn…