While the real world is dealing with serious issues the sports world will finally have something to talk about when players start reporting into Fayetteville a week from Monday.

Yes, we’ve gotten to a week from that magical date nobody really paid much attention to before this year when players show up and can once again resume official workouts on school property.

It’s something for fans to get excited about. There will be a lot of players glad to actually be back into working out and will probably be glad to hear a strength coach yelling at them.

Coaches will be ecstatic.

For the media, we’ll finally be able to starting talking about football actually being a realistic possibility. Oh, it was going to happen all along. When there’s that many billions of dollars involved you figure out a way.

Even the folks in California are on board with the Pac-12 announcing last week they figure, well, June 15 is a good time for their players to be back on campus.

A month ago a lot of the knee-jerk media folks were writing off the entire league for the year. California, still under one of those stay-at-home orders, has some things to figure out, but the guess is they will.

It was clear in a story last week at Sports Illustrated, Stanford coach David Shaw is sick and tired of the league being dismissed.

“It was hard turning on the TV and watching some sports experts — I’m using air quotes — really say that ‘We don’t know if they’re going to play football over there and maybe all those players should transfer and hopefully this one-time transfer rule goes through!'”

California schools will start later than everybody else unless something happens with those stay-at-home orders in the area of some schools. The state is really, really big.

“As long as we’re back in at some point during the month of July, we won’t be far behind,” Shaw said.

Razorback fans could not care less what they do in California because their players will be back next Monday and there will at least be workouts to kick around.

For us in the media we can start making predictions based on what we get from those workouts that don’t include team work or anything other than lifting weights, running and jumping around.

But, hey, it’s better than nothing, right?