One week after the Pro Football Hall of Fame indicated optimism for having fans in the stands in Fawcett Stadium in Canton for the annual preseason kickoff contest, Ohio governor Mike DeWine all but squashed the idea.
DeWine addressed the idea of having fans attending the game between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, and his response was not a good sign. His worries over the global coronavirus pandemic remain strong and cautious.
“As much as I hate to say this, because we’ve all been looking forward to that and I know how much it means to the Canton area and the Stark County area and really across the country, it’s a great great event that we’ve been looking forward to, [but ] having a crowd that size is highly unlikely,” DeWine said. “Certainly, it could not occur today. It would be very dangerous to do it today.”
DeWine continued,
“Again, we have to see where we are at that point, but that’s a large crowd, a lot of people together. These are the things that we’ve talked about all the way through this as we open Ohio up and we get back to work and we get back to doing the things that we like, probably the last things that are going to be able to be open are the big crowds, particularly when you have big crowds that are close together. So we have to continue to look at it and make decisions as we move forward, but if the question was, ‘could that even occur today?’ the answer would be, ‘no.’
This casts more of a cloud over the potential to have fans at Browns training camp in Berea, as well as for any preseason games at FirstEnergy Stadium.