Kudos to the owners: They scheduled their lockout to match the Omicron surge

Thanks to Covid, the American sports landscape is a mess: Players sidelined, coaches fired, stars called out for hypocrisy...  

Wait, no... that's normalcy. What's crazy are that major pro franchises - such as Duke, UCLA and North Carolina - are canceling games, leaving good money on the table... merely because of a global pandemic. 

Nevertheless, two crafty citadels of sportsmanship remain relatively untouched.  

1. MLB. Since December 2, the owners have practiced an airtight quarantine - aka a "lockout." By closing their facilities, these titans of science surely saved player lives. They don't allow athletes to congregate for workouts and news conferences, and they even canceled the front office getaway romps, also known as the Winter Meetings. 

I don't know what these scions of knowledge knew in advance, but their timing has been impeccable. 

2. NY football. I'm referring to the two wiliest sports franchises in America, the Jets and Giants. Somehow, these citadels of forethought recognized that 2021 would devolve into a tidal wave of viral mutations, and thus, they both executed near perfect tankings. 

If the NFL season were to end today - and it might - the Jets would draft 4th and 8th, while the Giants would hold picks numbers 5 and 6. That's what Joe Garagiola would call "a fine piece a' tankin.'"

Of course, either team might trade all its picks for a fading QB - the ghost of Craig Morton, if you're old enough to remember - but that's why we follow the teams: To see how they'll manage to muck it up. 

Remember: For Gilligan's Island to continue, the castaways always had to figure out some new and creative way to stay stranded. With two high picks, how will they do it? (I'm thinking they'll draft a big guy who turns out to be two midgets piggyback.) 

Anyway, congrats to all those who foresaw the utter meaninglessness of sports during crises of humanity. In the names of Ender Inciarte and Joe Don Looney, we salute you.