NFL chief medical officer Allen Sills is optimistic that pro football will kickoff Sept. 10, but Anthony Fauci has a much more tempered assessment.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases joined CNN on Thursday morning and expressed his doubts that football will be played in the fall.
“Unless players are essentially in a bubble — insulated from the community and they are tested nearly every day — it would be very hard to see how football is able to be played this fall,” Fauci said via the Houston Chronicle. “If there is a second wave, which is certainly a possibility and which would be complicated by the predictable flu season, football may not happen this year.”
Teams are expected to report to training camp in late July. However, there have been COVID-19 positive cases over the past week, including a couple Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans players.
Though the NFL has codified policies on how to handle social distancing and ultra sanitary practices in the wake of COVID-19, each team will have its own challenges. The Texans will have complications refitting NRG Stadium, which they don’t own outright and are co-tenants, for the NFL’s COVID-19 mandates.
The NFL has never had to suspend a season, as the NHL did in 2004-05, or suspend operations that resulted in an incomplete season, as what happened to the MLB in 1994 with the player’s strike. The NFL has had two strikes since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger disrupt play — 1982 and 1987 — but they have never halted operations that led to a cancelled season.
Individual teams have suspended operations though. During World War II, when players left the game to serve their country, the Cleveland Rams bowed out of the 1943 season. The Pittsburgh Steelers merged with the Philadelphia Eagles in 1943 and the Chicago Cardinals in 1944.
If the NFL is adamant that their schedule will be play as planned, they may need to come up with more measures and allowances.