Christine Brennan, a sports columnist at USA Today, wants you to know that the Big Ten deciding to make a return to football is “the darkest day in Big Ten sports history” — apparently, even worse than the days the scandals of Jerry Sandusky at Penn State or Larry Nassar at Michigan State came to light.

“Four of the worst sex abuse scandals in US history: Jerry Sandusky at PSU; Larry Nassar at MSU; Richard Strauss at OSU; Robert Anderson at Michigan. All that evil, all on Big Ten campuses. Chilling. Today is about an awful conference-wide sports decision,” Brennan tweeted while promoting her latest piece.

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Oddly, Brennan doesn’t mention the sex abuse scandals in the article itself, but she goes on in the piece to call Big Ten presidents cowards who let President Trump and a couple of college football coaches run their teams “right into the teeth of what are predicted to be some of the worst days of the pandemic.” Brennan’s deluded diatribe comes on the heels of countless pieces on how much she doesn’t want college football to be played, including that she won’t be watching the season and that she “takes no joy” in seeing the season canceled.

It shouldn’t need to be said that playing a season of college football is not in any way comparable to the molestation of children and young women. Brennan would presumably rather see the Big Ten and the other conferences playing the season lose football forever, considering that’s what she wanted to see happen to Penn State after the Sandusky scandal.

Brennan assumes that college football players have no agency whatsoever and ignores that it was the Big Ten athletes and their parents who pushed the conference to reconsider its cancellation. These athletes are already on campus: Several schools in the Big Ten started the fall semester with in-person classes for their thousands of students. Are they really made any safer on campus by being barred from playing football?

The risks for young athletes are already minimal anyway. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 195 men between the ages of 15 and 24 have passed away from the coronavirus or virus-related complications. Every death is a tragedy, of course, but there are nearly 22 million men in that age range in the United States. College football players are in the safest age range of any adults in the country.

Big Ten athletes wanted to play college football this year. Their parents wanted them to play football this year. Athletes who think it’s too risky have been afforded the option to opt out without losing their scholarship or roster spot. Perhaps those such as Brennan who claim to care about the exploitation of college athletes should realize that the players have their own voice, and they have made their position clear.