Exactly two weeks from right now, the Raiders will be on the field playing a game at Carolina. That’s the NFL season’s big kickoff Sunday, something not so long ago that looked like a long shot.
Rewind to April when the NFL draft festivities in Las Vegas were cancelled along with all offseason training and practices. The COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up and the sports world was shut down.
At that time the glimmer of hope for the NFL was that they had just entered their long offseason officially in early February, giving it the best chance of figuring things out and holding their 2020 season.
As the months went by, it seemed to become more and more of a distinct possibility that the season could be delayed, shortened, or even canceled altogether. But the NFL continued to move forward with their schedule through it all.
Come mid-July, the NFL still hadn’t figured out what they were going to do. They had no testing program and training camp was still on schedule. How in the world they were supposed to hold a normal training camp, preseason, and start the regular season with no interruption was anyone’s guess.
The first move was to cancel part of the preseason. That turned into cancelling the entire preseason. It was the natural decision as these players were nowhere near ready to play in a game and the protocols weren’t yet set up to deal with teams flying across the country to play each other, let alone in a meaningless exhibition game.
I must clarify the term “meaningless” in this context. The game is meaningless to the team in terms of wins and losses. But for individual players and the coaches’ ability to gage their talent, these games hold great meaning.
Each team would not only have to make a decision on ten players to cut to get down from 90 to 80 players before even reporting to camp, but they would have to make a decision on getting from 80 to 53 players without ever seeing them on the field in a live game situation.
The benefit to no preseason is it allowed the team to cram an offseason worth of practices into five weeks, knowing they weren’t having to prepare their players for full speed games mixed in.
That five weeks is over. Their last training camp practice was last Wednesday and their last scrimmage was Friday at Allegiant.
In just six days, the roster will trim from 80 to 53 players. The day after that, a 12-man practice squad will be formed. Then it’s game official game week. Which is just amazing, really.
Unlike the NBA, the NFL didn’t have a bubble. They also have ten times as many players. It required incredible discipline from the players to act responsibly and not expose themselves to the coronavirus. In total the Raiders had just three players placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list, all of whom came off it early in camp and appear to have suffered no ill effects of the virus.
Last week saw a significant issue with the testing company that yielded league-wide ‘false positives’, but they appear to have gotten it straightened out quickly with little interruption to the training camp schedule.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more actual positive tests, and everything is smooth sailing from here. But the Raiders and the NFL did an impressive job taking the pandemic seriously and acting in a responsible manner in order to keep the season on track.
Thus, we are here. Imagine that. It’s amazing what listening to science, looking out for the person next to you, and acting responsibly can accomplish.
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