FORT WORTH, Texas (TNS) — At this point in the pandemic, there seem to be two primary sensibilities about how to approach the virus.

The first says the threat of COVID-19 is so serious that strict personal and public safety measures need to continue indefinitely, or be reimposed, to ensure society’s safety. Let’s call this the Risk Averse Team.

The other says that COVID-19 is serious but is only one risk factor among many that we face in everyday life and measures to mitigate, much less eliminate, that risk have often exceeded their cost. This is the Risk Management Team.

The former tends to be left of center politically; the latter tends to lean to the right (although, the politics of the coronavirus are not unflinching and plenty of people don’t fit that mold).

Members of each team can look at the same data and draw completely different conclusions — Infections are hitting record levels! The fatality rate is going down! — often but not always influenced by their political ideology and preferred narrative.

Just look at how this has played out in the debate over school reopenings.

But schools are just the tip of the iceberg because football season is approaching, and there is no more appropriate place than a football field for the rival camps to duke it out.

Last week, the Big Ten and the Pac 12 conferences announced that they will be, respectively, postponing and canceling their college football seasons.

If you are a player, a fan, or most importantly depend on college football to make your living, that’s varying degrees of devastating.

But if you’re risk averse, it makes complete sense.

However, to members of Team Risk Management, that must seem absurd and terribly unfair.

Especially considering that the other three major conferences, the Big 12, the SEC and the ACC plan to play with strict precautions in place.

All five conferences have a team of the country’s best medical experts advising them. Yet they’ve come to very different conclusions.

In announcing his conference’s postponement, Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren said that after consulting medical professionals, “it became abundantly clear that there was too much uncertainty regarding potential medical risks to allow our student-athletes to compete this fall.”

The next day, after a 90-minute briefing by the Big 12’s medical team, Commissioner Bob Bowlsby took the opposite approach, stating that his conference is “comfortable in our institutions’ ability to provide a structured training environment, rigorous testing and surveillance, hospital quality sanitation and mitigation practices that optimize the health and safety of our student-athletes.”

Same data, different camps.

This sets up a football season of unusual importance in understanding whether we can live with the coronavirus or must significantly alter our way of life until it’s eradicated — in other words, possibly never.

At the very least, this experiment will enable us to directly contrast the results of the two approaches to the pandemic in a way we haven’t been able to thus far.

If COVID-19 rates spike as students return to campus and if players end up hospitalized because the close-contact nature of football forces the Big 12, SEC, and ACC to abandon their plans and shut down the season, the Risk Averse Team will look prescient and wise.

However, if by November, the leagues that chose to play are halfway through an exciting and safe football season with few (we have to assume there will be some) COVID-19 complications, the Risk Management Team will have proved that not only is management possible, but probably the better approach.

Heaven knows that if America needs anything right now, it’s some good old college football rivalries to help us forget all the other things we’re warring about.

Of course, the rivalry on the field this fall will pale in comparison to the one off the field between whose narrative is (more) correct: the lock-it-downs or the-learn-to-live-with-its.

But maybe this unusual season will help us settle that debate.

Play ball.

(Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.)