Sports

College Football Game Canceled Less Than Three Hours Before Kickoff Due To 450-Year-Old Illness

by Last Updated
College Football Whooping Cough South Dakota Portland State
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Saturday’s college football game between South Dakota and Portland State was cancelled with less than three hours until kickoff due to a 450-year-old illness. Both teams agreed it would be best not to play after an outbreak of pertussis in the Vikings’ locker room.

Pertussis, a highly-contagious respiratory illness, is better known as “whooping cough” in common vernacular.

Yes, you read that correctly. A sporting even in the year 2024 was cancelled because of the whooping cough.

Kickoff was originally scheduled for 1:00 p.m. PST. The Coyotes arrived to Oregon on Friday afternoon. They took a flight from Sioux City to Portland with full intention of playing the game as planned.

Portland State’s collective immune system had a different idea.

A case of pertussis was first discovered on Tuesday. A number of players were hacking it up come practice on Thursday. Even though the affected athletes were quarantined, the precautionary isolation was too late. Most of the team was exposed to the illness through direct or indirect contact.

Officials from both programs were in discussion about how to proceed throughout the week. Team doctors did their best to get a handle on the situation but the ship had already sailed.

According to South Dakota, “it was determined by Portland State that the game would not be played in the interest of the health of the student-athletes.” The game was cancelled with approximately three hours until kickoff.

Both teams would obviously prefer to play.

However, this unfortunate scenario is most disappointing for the visitors. They spent all of that money to charter a flight to the Pacific Northwest and to house their team for no reason. A proactive decision probably could’ve been made earlier in the week to call off the game before the ‘Yotes flew across the country, but that’s not what happened.

Whooping cough was first described as a distinctive disease during the Paris epidemic of 1578. It had previously been called the “dog bark” in Italy, “chin cough” or “kin cough” in England, and “100-day cough” in China. Thomas Sydenham later gave the disease the scientific latin name of “infantum pertussis” in 1679. A vaccine was then invented in 1914.

Now, nearly 500 years since its formal acceptance as a specific illness, the whooping cough is the singular reason that Saturday’s college football game between the University of South Dakota and Portland State University was cancelled. That’s a new one!