In a COVID season, NFL found a way to play every game

TAMPA, FLA. » More than the youth of Patrick Mahomes or the agelessness of Tom Brady, the most compelling story surrounding this year’s Super Bowl was that it was happening at all.

It took nearly 1 million COVID-19 tests, thousands of Zoom meetings, a dozen or so rescheduled games and an untold amount of flexibility for the NFL to not miss a single of its 269 regular-season and postseason games in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

Game No. 269, the Super Bowl, is set to be a fascinating matchup of young (Mahomes) vs. old (Brady) — the Kansas City Chiefs against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

It’s to be played Sunday in a one-third-full and socially distanced stadium and with millions of fingers crossed around the country. T he NFL and society, in general, are hoping America’s biggest sports celebration won’t turn into the mother of superspreader events, either at the stadium or at the inevitable thousands of high-fiving, chip-dipping, hug-it-out Super Bowl parties planned across the land.

With the reality that the most important results of the Super Bowl — the spike, or lack of spike, in COVID-19 numbers — wouldn’t be known until well after the final score was posted and most of the $4.3 billion in expected wagers are settled, the NFL still scored points by merely making it to the finish line without any major disruptions.

“The fact that every team played the correct number of games. and that most people did not get sick, is a real testament to their perseverance in making it happen,” said Dennis Deninger, who teaches a Super Bowl and Society class for Syracuse’s sports management department.

The resiliency of the players and the league stood out as a bright note this winter, as the coronavirus ravaged the United States and the world. The NFL’s ability to keep the show moving — albeit imperfectly — reinforced the sport’s strong footing in American culture. It also generated debate about whether the country and the league have their priorities straight, given that resources devoted to playing football could have conceivably been expended elsewhere.

“In some ways, you say, it doesn’t feel right to be talking about sports and thinking about sports in the middle of a pandemic,” said Ketra Armstrong, the director at University of Michigan’s Center for Race and Ethnicity in Sport. “But when you think the role sports can play for the psyche of the country, and you understand the level people are going to to deliver sports, you can appreciate” the effort the NFL made to make the season happen.

And, in fact, the NFL’s efforts benefitted more than simply the league’s own interests. Using as a backbone of its research the approximately 957,000 tests it conducted on more than 7,500 players and employees, the NFL collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control to publish a paper describing testing protocols, mitigation strategies and contact-tracing measures that could also be useful in “high-density environments” such as schools and long-term care facilities.