‘Next man up’ is a lie for league amid pandemic
In a league dominated by brutal injuries, NFL players have to be replaceable. Lost a step? Next man up. Nearly lost a leg? Next man up. Concussion? Next man up, now that we treat players for them.
But the pandemic has laid bare that NFL-level players are not quite as disposable as the league wants them to be. In order to tamp down on potential outbreaks, the league has implemented a relatively strict surveillance regime that has knocked out whole position groups for several teams, with disastrous results. When the next man up can’t throw, catch or block, the whole thing falls apart.
“Next man up” always has been a curious fit with the NFL. It would make some sense in a sport with a fully functioning minor league system, or even a single developmental league. Instead, as the league’s pandemic plan has accidentally proven, when NFL rosters get thin, there’s nowhere to go. In a way, it would be a more suitable motto for a sport like baseball, which has a massive system of underpaid backup players that teams can call on in any moment.
When the Miami Marlins lost half their roster to COVID, they were able to call up a talented if slightly unseasoned group of minor leaguers and rip off a winning streak. When the Broncos lost four quarterbacks to a “masking slip,” they had to start a medical salesman and couldn’t move the ball; when the Browns lost four players to a hot tub, they had to slot a dog trainer in the lineup and lost to the freaking Jets.
No one embodied “next man up” more than the Patriots, who spent the last two decades winning Super Bowls with Tom Brady and a bunch of purported nobodies. This offseason, Brady left and eight players, including key parts of the defense, opted out because of the pandemic. With an entire roster of next men, the Patriots are terrible. How’s the “year of Next Man Up” going?
“I don’t think it should have as big of an impact as it’s having,” Trent
Green repeatedly said on Sunday’s CBS broadcast of the Browns not having their top four receivers for the game. It really wasn’t that complicated. The Browns couldn’t pass because they didn’t have any receivers, they couldn’t protect the quarterback because the receivers were never open, and they couldn’t run because they couldn’t pass. It made for an offense bad enough to lose to the Jets.
Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield came into the Jets game one of the hottest players in football. He came out of it having a self-flagellating meltdown, leaving the post-game Zoom call after one question and saying “there’s no excuse” and “I failed this team” over and over again. There’s one excuse: You had never practiced or played with the three wide receivers who played, and the receivers themselves were not very good.
But the NFL would rather contort itself around its foundational lies than just admit they’re lies. Mayfield’s teammates and coaches were tripping over themselves to say that actually, it was their fault the Browns lost. “I’m one of the reasons we did lose this game,” cornerback Denzel Ward said. “That has nothing to do with the result of this game,” coach Kevin Stefanski said of having to game-plan for no receivers on zero notice and do a game-day walkthrough in a parking garage.
“Next man up” has always been more of an abstraction than practice. It exists as an idea in service of tamping down the value and personality of players while tying fans’ investment to laundry and not individuals.