It’s been well over a year since the Covid-19 Pandemic swept through the entire world leaving stadiums completely bare. At that point, when the pandemic first started, it was a good idea to keep fans and patrons away from sporting events. After all, we had no idea what Covid was or how it was transmitted from person to person. From that point moving forward, we learned a lot. Despite what some in the national media had said to be impossible, we successfully made it through several sporting seasons in 2020 without any major issues. This leads us to where we find ourselves right now. With a vaccine and scientific evidence as our guide, it’s time we stop living in fear and open our stadiums and events to full capacity.

For some in the states of Mississippi, Florida, and Texas, stadiums have been at full capacity for two months. There’s been no mass breakout of Covid in those cities that can be tied back to sporting events. Or, for that matter, celebrations that have happened after championship wins this year. Experts from the CDC and the federal government have said that such gatherings would cause a massive spike in Covid cases across the country. With all due respect to those very smart people in charge, but they were wrong. There has been zero supporting evidence to back this claim. In reality, the numbers in those towns have decreased drastically, which can be credited to reaching herd immunity and the vaccine rollout.

Not to mention the positive economic impact opening everything up would have on towns across the country. When you study the impact that Covid has had on all the sports towns across the country, it’s astronomical the amount of money that was lost in those towns because of lockdowns and the inability of being able to be at 100% capacity.

Take a town like Starkville, Mississippi, for example. Starkville, like many other towns across the country, is a small college town whose entire economy depends on eight Saturday’s in the fall when the Bulldogs are playing football at Davis Wade Stadium, or ten weekends in the spring when 12,000 plus file into the town to watch the bulldogs play baseball. Without those weekends, the economies of those towns collapse and businesses close.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to giving fans the freedom to decide what’s best for them. If they feel comfortable attending a sporting event with thousands of others then they should be given the freedom to do so. It’s their right to attend a game of their choosing without having to worry about regulations and restrictions that would prohibit them from boosting our economies across the country and keeping them from having a moment of normalcy and happiness.