Baseball is teetering on the brink; what of the NFL?
Among all my day-today concerns - and there is a laundry list of them, from the mundane (“do I have enough hair on top of my head to maintain this disgraced surfer look I’ve got going on right now?”) to the not-at-all mundane (“I sure would like to not perish from COVID-19”), one item is bubbling to the top: How the hell is the NFL going to get through this season?
This is not an academic exercise for me. Not only do I enjoy sitting down and watching some football in the autumn, but I also spend - and this is not hyperbole - every waking moment from late August to early January thinking about the NFL in terms of fantasy sports and gambling. I wish I was joking a bit about this, stretching the truth, but I’m not. Ask my wife. She’ll tell you. I am positive my general productivity takes a massive hit, along with my parenting skills, husband duties, everything. When I wake up in the morning during football season, my first thoughts always go to the NFL. So do my second and third thoughts. I consume more information on a daily basis about the NFL than anything else I do all year.
I’ve been this way since I was 14 years old. If they gave Ph.D’s in gambling on the NFL, I’d have one, plus a handful of honorary degrees. This will continue for me until forever.
And not for nuthin’, but
I’m pretty damn good at this fantasy and gambling thing. I honestly put myself in the 95th percentile of knowledge, and the 99th percentile on how to use that knowledge to my financial gain.
It’s a hobby, it’s a parttime job, it’s a lifestyle. And the coronavirus is going to ruin it.
Oh I know, poor me, boo-hoo-hoo, but come on: This is football we’re talking about. The National Football League.
And it didn’t have to be this way.
The NFL could’ve should’ve - followed the plan of the NBA. And the WNBA. And the NHL. They could’ve bubbled up, brought the whole shebang to a few select cities near you, put everyone under lock and key, and played the season.
Instead … well, look at Major League Baseball. They went the non-bubble route. The Marlins franchise has been shut down for a week. A bunch of players on the Cardinals tested positive. I’m sadly confident more of this will happen in the coming weeks. Will baseball be able to finish out it’s season? Maybe, maybe not. Already, the league has notified television stations to plan for alternate programming as early as Monday, according to ESPN.
But if this happened in the NFL? If a bunch of players test positive? A cancelled game in baseball - even a week’s worth of games - isn’t the end of the world. But in football? You can’t cancel games. You can’t keep a team off the field for a week or three. The whole season gets destroyed.
And that’s my fear. Football teams - which carry twice the roster and probably 10 times the support staff - can’t expect to magically not have players and/or staff get the virus when they’re out in the world.
I fail to see how the NFL season is going to work. I hope I’m very, very, very wrong for a myriad of reasons. But I’m almost certain I’m not.
Of course, there’s still a month before kickoff. The NFL, being the NFL, can pretty much do whatever it damn well pleases. That’s the benefit of being a multi-billion dollar operation.
In short: It’s not too late. The NFL can still bubble up and have a normal season.
“Return to normal” has been a rallying cry for everyone when it comes to the coronavirus. It’s all anyone wants. And having a proper NFL season is as normal as it gets.
A truncated NFL season - or, and let’s be real here - a cancelled NFL season is about as abnormal as it gets.
The NFL needs to reverse course, and reverse course immediately. The season is in obvious jeopardy. The time to bubble is now.
Jeff Edelstein is a columnist for The Trentonian. He can be reached at jedelstein@ trentonian.com, facebook. com/jeffreyedelstein and @jeffedelstein on Twitter.