This week the NFL announced that the 2021 Pro Bowl was headed to Las Vegas. This would make the second major NFL event to be scheduled to take place in Las Vegas. The first was the draft. And due to the coronavirus outbreak that didn’t happen. It’s possible the Pro Bowl could suffer the same fate.
The Pro Bowl and its festivities are set for the final week of January, in the week between the Conference Championship games and the Super Bowl. But for any of those things to happen, there would have to be a season. According to the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, the season is still on shaky ground.
“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 told CNN. “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.”
Currently coaches across the NFL are returning to facilities with players scheduled to join them in mid-July with training camp beginning on July 28.
The NFL already nixed their entire offseason program and recent positive tests by several players would seem to cast doubt on everything moving forward smoothly and on-time for the NFL. Though commissioner Roger Goodell seem unfazed. The NFL is even discussing the possibility of upping practice squads from 10 to 16 players to prepare for the possibility of more players testing positive. A rather grim thought considering this is a deadly disease.
Even if the risk of death goes down for young, healthy individuals, there it is still risky to move forward with the season on-schedule. Consider that of even one player or coach contracts the disease at the facility or stadium and dies, that is one too many because the NFL would be to blame for it.
We’d all love for football to go off without interruption. But this is uncharted territory and nothing is set in stone right now. The number of new cases is still going up in some states. A few states are seeing a downslope in new cases, but as Dr Fauci notes, if the expected second wave happens, things could change quickly.