With the NFL Draft just days away and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones suddenly on the president’s task force aiming to bring sports back, the NFL is currently moving forward as if the 2020 season is going to happen. Reports even surfaced this week that the league has been working on contingency plans that include cancelling early-season games or possibly playing in empty stadiums.
There are, of course, literal fortunes that would be lost if the NFL — or any major sports league, for that matter — simply pulled the plug on an entire season outright, so the owners and league executives will undoubtedly look for any alternative they can find to put on some semblance of normality. Anything to fulfill the contractual obligations of playing the games, more or less, as scheduled.
In that almost-no-price-is-too-high vein, a new term has made its way into the conversation. What if the NFL could find itself a bubble city?
The idea is to relocate all 32 teams- players and essential club personnel- to a single city. Sequester them in hotels shown to be virus-free. Ferry them to and from the field for games, where they play in front of network broadcast crews… but no fans. Then keep them isolated in that bubble the rest of the time. Rinse and repeat, for the duration of a whole season.
An extreme way to salvage the season? Certainly. But is it even feasible?
Mike Leslie of WFAA notes thinks it seems at least technically possible. And Dallas – Fort Worth is one of the perhaps few metropolitan areas that could pull it off.
Start with AT&T Stadium, the cornerstone of this plan. JerryWorld could do the heavy lifting by hosting as many as six games in a weekend: Thursday night, two Saturday games (since college football may not play this fall), two Sunday games, and Monday night. With no need to change out the field, no concessions or vendors, and greatly reduced cleaning necessary after each game, it’s logistically do-able, in theory.
But it would by no means be easy.
Leslie’s modest proposal hinges on AT&T Stadium doing double-duty with a doubleheader every Saturday and Sunday. Assume that those kickoffs were spaced out as far as possible- say, the early midday slot and the late primetime slot both days- and it’s still a tight turnaround. Teams’ equipment crews need access to the locker rooms well in advance of the game. And it takes them a long time- even once the players leave- to pack it all up afterward. Then, for this bubble season to work, a separate crew would have to come in and sanitize everything: field, sidelines, locker rooms, press areas, and any other place that’s been touched- all before the next game’s teams can even get off the bus.
Even if the league dramatically shortened the windows of accessibility to the stadium with abbreviated pregame load-ins and hurried postgame load-outs to help facilitate such a doubleheader plan, crews would be cutting it close every time.
If everyone were motivated enough, though, they could make it happen. The home of the Cowboys could indeed serve as the primary field for the NFL’s 2020 campaign.
But there are still as many as ten games left to be played each weekend. Luckily, the Metroplex has no shortage of monster-sized football stadiums that could easily handle network-quality broadcasts. This is Texas, after all.
Leslie calls on TCU’s Carter Stadium, SMU’s Gerald Ford Stadium, the original Cotton Bowl Stadium, McKinney’s ISD Stadium- all outstanding facilities that rival most NFL arenas- to take on two games each per weekend. A Saturday game and a Sunday game at each of those four locations; that’s now fourteen total.
Put another Saturday-Sunday slate in the Cowboys’ five-star indoor facility, Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, and the math works. There are other world-class facilities just in case, like Eagle Stadium at Allen High School and Toyota Stadium in Frisco, even Globe Life Park in Arlington, the former home of MLB’s Rangers, located across the street from AT&T Stadium.
Yes, Dallas could, at least in terms of properly-outfitted gameday facilities, be the NFL’s bubble city.
But don’t ever forget one important thing about bubbles.
They burst. Often without warning. Sometimes at just the slightest nudge.
And that’s the danger Sports Illustrated‘s Stephanie Apstein calls out in a piece from last week.
Staging an NFL season is about far, far more than just finding enough gridirons to host the actual games. Even in empty stadiums, with players locked in their protective bubble with daily COVID testing, there are countless other logistical concerns that would have to be addressed. The key issue with a bubble city isn’t geography; it’s science.
For starters, Apstein writes, “every person who would have access to the facilities will need to be isolated separately for two weeks to ensure that no infection could enter. That’s players and coaches, athletic trainers and interpreters, reporters and broadcasters, plus housekeeping and security personnel. No one can come in or out. Food will have to be delivered. Hotel and stadium employees will have to be paid enough to compensate for their time away from their families. Everyone onsite will have to be tested multiple times during this initial period.”
Ignore for a moment that adequately testing any group of individuals for coronavirus has proven to be easier said than done. The supply simply hasn’t been able to keep up with demand as of yet. Testing every player on every NFL roster multiple times during the initial quarantine- while doctors and nurses and frontline workers and the general public go completely without- just to save the pro football season is a whole different debate.
Because even with all that testing, consider how easily it could fall apart.
“If one person gets [the virus],” Apstein suggests, “he or she will begin spreading it immediately, so everyone will have to continue practicing social distancing. That probably means using a new ball for each play. It probably means seating players in stands rather than on benches or in dugouts. It certainly means banning high-fives.”
But there’s more.
“If a player needs treatment by outside medical personnel, even just for a sprained ankle, he or she has left the secure area and will need to isolate for 14 days before returning to it. And, of course, medical resources need to be abundant enough that society can afford to have ambulances and EMTs on call for games, plus doctors and nurses—clad in currently-scarce protective equipment—who can tend to sports injuries.”
And that’s just for the three hours it takes to play a game. Once the players are driven back to their hotels- in buses whose drivers would also have to agree to be similarly isolated through all of this- there are 165 other hours each week where each and every NFL player would have to live under the kind of microscope that not even Dallas Cowboys are subject to.
“And then once they are back in their rooms,” the SI article continues, “every person involved will have to follow rules. You can’t take your kids to the park. You can’t run to the grocery store. You can’t invite your Bumble match up to your room. These are humans, so the leagues would surely require insurance: That means security personnel (another group that would need to isolate) or invasive cell phone tracking (good luck getting that by the players’ union). If your wife gives birth or your father dies of cancer and you want to be there, that’s another 14-day reentry period.”
Remember, at any point during the entire five months of this laborious, exhausting, and surreal exercise, the whole delicate bubble pops at the slightest disruption.
“What if the person delivering groceries to the biodome walks by someone who coughs on the lettuce and a week later, a player tests positive? Is there an option other than shutting down the whole operation for 14 days?”
Carl Bergstrom, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Washington, offers a blunt answer to Apstein’s hypothetical.
“No,” he says.
“And that’s really the end of the conversation,” Apstein maintains. “Even if we can start this, we almost certainly can’t finish it.”
It’s a fascinating brain game, perhaps, to think about the logistics of housing an entire football season for 32 teams in one city’s stadiums. Thousands upon thousands of tiny details and average-sized what-ifs and gargantuan sacrifices would have to line up just right, though, to even conceive of actually doing it. And it would take the most random thing ever- literally, one person coughing wrong- to butterfly-effect the whole enterprise into a million disastrous pieces. Just so the owners don’t have to give back advertising dollars. Just so football fans still banned from large gatherings in real-life can sit alone in their man caves and pretend to feel normal for three hours on a Sunday in October while Joe Buck and Troy Aikman dissect Xs and Os. Just so the games can be played.
Yes, the NFL probably could build a bubble city.
But it might not survive watching it burst.
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