Did you hear the one about the college football team prevailing with 20 members of its two-deep sidelined?

Or, how could you miss the bigger splash by Kansas State, which rebounded from its Arkansas State embarrassment to upset Oklahoma last weekend?

Whatever the handicaps, the fervor is unmatched. In what some call “The Devil’s Playbook,” the nation’s 10 major conferences have defied their instincts to provide coast-to-coast excitement amid the worst pandemic in 100 years. This massive movement, also encompassing high schools throughout the South, Midwest and Plains (except Illinois), disregards the carefully worded warnings of our medical experts, such as:

“We have a lot more evidence of failing to manage the risks than we have evidence of successfully demonstrating this can be done and not creating a significant outbreak risk.”

What, then, does it mean in the bigger picture? For me, this stunning revival, indelibly stamped by our leading educators, tosses concussion scares into the closet and announces in the loudest voice possible: Football is simply too big to fail … too meaningful to the proletariat, too financially vital in a national swoon that is crippling restaurants, hotels and airlines.

Risk assessmentAdmit it.

You completely forgot the warnings expressed by John Kass, Bob Costas and others within the media circus that CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) would soon ring the death knell of the NFL.

As the Chicago Tribune’s Kass proclaimed three years ago, middle class parents’ concerns for their sons’ brains were thinning youth leagues, the game’s feeder system. He cited a Boston University test showing 110 of 111 former NFL players suffered from CTE.

“Without that feeder system to provide fresh meat and fresh brains to the NFL meat grinder, the NFL as we know it is doomed. Putting your kids in football would be akin to giving them a cigarette,” Kass wrote.

Maybe so. But smokers will smoke. Boxers will box (ever hear of dementia pugilistica?). Motorcyclists will cycle. One annual auto race in Indianapolis has taken the lives of 73 individuals, including 42 drivers.

In 2018, nearly 10 horses died every week in American race tracks.

As a country, our obsession with alcohol has carried it into our college stands. And drug overdoses have thinned our celebrity ranks while underground suppliers kill each other in turf battles.

Too many variables in playFace it, people don’t always act with logic. In the ultimate act against self-interest, recent statistics show suicide as the second-leading cause of death for ages 10 to 34 (of 100,000 citizens, 14 are likely to kill themselves).

My point is simply that football is certainly body-damaging but it isn’t going anywhere.

You see in this country how it dwarfs soccer, the otherwise dominant world sport.

You see how it overtook baseball and basketball, standing as the NFL’s top TV attraction for NBC, Fox, CBS, ESPN and the NFL Network.

You see how gambling and fantasy football have wrapped themselves around it.

Amid this pandemic, the SEC, ACC and Big 12 stood strong and brought others grudgingly along. The Big Ten’s top medical experts changed their tune about risks in little more than a month’s time.

Presidents and chancellors were more than happy to get this off their hands.

Maybe you see this picture in a different light. But from my view, King Football has waded helmet-first into this pandemic, and has too much momentum to be sidetracked by CTE or any other challenge.

Youth leagues in Michael Jordan’s Chicago may lose numbers, but the bigger, stronger youths will always be attracted by the money, fame and academic opportunities before them … hang the risks.