Of all the major sports, pro football has felt the least impact from the current pandemic. The NFL hasn’t had to cancel games or scrap its postseason tournament. Roger Goodell didn’t have to deal with two teams’ worth of his players walking off the field moments before a big game as a public address announcer asked the fans to just go home. For the NFL and its fans, the only real change that’s been made is the made-for-TV event that is the annual draft, now a virtual affair with GMs calling in from their basements.
But the National Football League is going to have to step out, so to speak, into the shelter-in-place world sooner rather than later. And for all the league’s public lip service that the 2020 campaign is moving ahead exactly as planned, it’s now looking more and more likely that the upcoming NFL season will be anything but normal.
In a piece published Wednesday, The Washington Post‘s Mark Maske and Dave Sheinin report that the league “has been planning for contingencies that include a potentially shortened schedule and holding games in empty or partially filled stadiums.”
The article cites two people familiar with the NFL’s planning.
“I don’t know if it’ll be a one-third-filled stadium, a half-filled stadium or whatever,” said one of them, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The NFL is planning for everything from playing without fans to playing in full stadiums. We know there will be a push from the [federal] government to open things up.”
As previously announced, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is among the high-profile sports commissioners and owners who has been asked by President Trump to assist in his push to re-open the country and the American economy.
Trump and his team spoke by phone on Wednesday. While no significant details of that call had been made public at the time of this writing, hockey insider Darren Dreger of Canadian channel The Sports Network was able to provide a bit of insight as to the overall direction of the conversation.
“We want to get our country open again,” the president said in a news conference Wednesday. “We want to have our sports leagues open. You want to watch sports. It’s important. We miss sports.”
“We have to get our sports back,” he said on Tuesday. “I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old.”
The NFL has not commented on any specific contingency plans for the upcoming season, but did say in a written statement to The Washington Post:
“As we have said, we are committed to protecting the health of our fans, players, club and league personnel, and communities. We look forward to the 2020 NFL season, and our guidelines and decisions will be guided by the latest advice from medical and public health officials, as well as current and future government regulations. We will continue to plan for the season and will be prepared to adjust as necessary, just as we have done with free agency, the draft, and now the offseason program.”
The 2020 regular season schedule is expected to be released around May 9, and will reportedly allow for the possibility of a delayed start to the season and the possible cancellation of games.
The Post source did make the point, however, that “‘the other leagues have to go first,’ referring to MLB, the NBA and the NHL.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the scientific spokesperson of record for millions of Americans regarding COVID-19, has already outlined a potential strategy for those other leagues to resume play this summer by isolating players and other essential personnel in a protective “bubble” with frequent testing.
“There’s a way of doing that,” said Fauci. “Nobody comes to the stadium. Put [players and other personnel] in big hotels, wherever you want to play, keep them very well surveilled [and] have them tested like every week, and make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family, and just let them play the season out… If you could get on television, Major League Baseball, to start July 4 [even if] nobody comes to the stadium — you just, you do it.”
But with some areas of the country displaying more virus activity than others, it could be up to authorities for each stadium location to make the call on how feasible that would be.
Dr. Jeffrey Smith, the chief executive for California’s Santa Clara County, has said it will take “a major miracle” for the NFL season to begin on time at Levi’s Stadium, where the 49ers play. According to ESPN, Dr. Smith went on to say that “for sports to resume even without fans… the county will need assurances not only that the coronavirus is contained but that cities where visiting teams live also are following safe distancing.”
MLB’s Mike Trout spoke with NBCSN about a “bubble” plan like the one Dr. Fauci proposed.
“I obviously want to play as fast as we can,” Trout said as per The Washington Post. “But [being self-isolated] would be difficult for some guys. What are you going to do with family members? My wife is pregnant. What am I going to do if she goes into labor? Am I going to have to go into quarantine for two weeks after I come back? Because obviously, I can’t miss the birth of our first child.
“So there’s a lot of red flags, a lot of questions. Obviously, we’d have to agree as players. But I think the mentality is, we want to get back as soon as we can. But obviously, it’s got to be realistic. We can’t just be sitting in a hotel room, just going from the field to the hotel room and not being able to do anything. I think that’s pretty crazy.”
One has to believe that many NFL players and team personnel would echo that sentiment.
Baseball players would at least get to escape that bubble for a game (albeit a surreal one in an empty ballpark) five or six nights a week. Sequestering 32 full NFL rosters in hotels and letting them out for three hours every Sunday just so football fans can pretend- perhaps while still quarantined at home- that things are back to normal seems, as Trout puts it, pretty crazy.
Maybe even crazier than just scrapping the 2020 season outright.
