Well, that didn’t take very long. After just four days of games, the MLB season is already in peril after at least 14 Marlins players and coaches tested positive for COVID-19, which has already led to the postponement of games.
As MLB scrambles to figure out where to go from here — though one would hope the league had already prepared such a scenario — the NFL world has gone into full-on panic mode and with good reason: If baseball, a non-contact sport with smaller rosters and coaching staffs, couldn’t make this work, football does not stand a chance. It’s hard to argue against that logic.
While the NBA’s bubble model has inspired some hope for professional sports starting back up in this country, it doesn’t really mean anything for the NFL season, which will be played under different circumstances. The NBA’s ability to put on a season — and, remember, we haven’t even gotten to the games that count yet — means nothing for football. So, no, this isn’t the other side of the story…
This is the other side of the story. https://t.co/mva4UYyxu3
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) July 27, 2020
The Marlins outbreak will likely lead to calls for the NFL adopting a bubble approach, but it’s far too late for that. Whether the NFL looked into such a model isn’t clear, but the logistics probably would have prevented it anyway. Procuring an isolated area capable of housing 32 NFL teams (plus referees!) would have been impossible on such short notice. Once that became apparent, the league should have come to the same conclusion that baseball will be likely be forced to come to in the very near future: This isn’t going to work.
The one advantage the NFL has over MLB is there are six days in between games. That’s a lot of time to test and, more importantly, to get those test results back. But the virus does not take Fridays or Saturdays off. That gap between games means nothing once we get past the early part of the week. It’s worth noting that the news of the Marlins outbreak broke on a Sunday.
Imagine if that happened in the NFL. Imagine if the league had to cancel a week of games. This isn’t baseball. You can’t make up football games by playing a doubleheader or taking advantage of a scheduled day off. One canceled game would throw off the entire season, as CBS Sports’ Jonathan Jones illustrated with this scenario:
If the Seahawks’ Week 10 game against the Rams is canceled due to one of the teams not having enough healthy players, you could wind up with NFC West standings that look like this:
San Francisco 12-4
Seattle 11-4
Los Angeles 10-5
Arizona 9-7Yes, you could take the win percentages of the teams and decide the division as such. But in this scenario, had Seattle beaten the 49ers twice, that Week 10 win against L.A. would have made the Seahawks the division champs and possibly given them the No. 1 overall seed and first-round bye. Instead, a wild-card headache would ensue across the NFC.
Based on what we’ve seen in the MLB, it’s a near-certainty that at least one NFL game — and likely many more — would be canceled, throwing the league standings into complete disarray.
And that’s just a logistical concern!
Remember, one NFL game being canceled means that several players were infected with a disease that ravages the body. These are people with lives that exist outside of football. They have families. We’d be putting lives in danger for the sake of entertainment. It feels like we recklessly skipped right over the question “Should NFL play football in 2020?” and moved onto “Can the NFL play football in 2020?”
It’s looking more and more like those two questions have the same answer.