Bubbles make sense for NFL playoffs
Are playoff bubbles coming to the NFL?
“The league is running the numbers,” a high-ranking team executive told USA TODAY under the condition of anonymity, referring to financial factors associated with secluding teams as a potential measure in dealing with the threat of COVID-19. The person did not want to be identified due to the fluid nature of pandemic plans.
Of course, throughout this unpredictable season, the NFL has maintained repeatedly that “all options are on the table,” as chief medical adviser Allen Sills put it during a recent media conference.
Which means they won’t stop turning over stones – including those linked to bubbles.
The NFL never seriously considered a bubble approach for the regular season, but the playoffs – if the campaign advances to that point as planned – will be a different animal with higher stakes for the competition and TV ratings. As the due diligence of projecting costs suggests, discussions about bubble possibilities will likely intensify as the league considers the stretch run on the road to Super Bowl LV.
When the NFL’s competition committee holds its Week 8 conference later this month, bubble concepts – first broached last summer by Saints coach Sean Payton – will undoubtedly be discussed, a person with knowledge of NFL considerations told USA TODAY under the condition of anonymity.
That person did not want to be identified, given that nothing is definitive at this point.
“I believe there’s an appetite to explore this,” the person told USA TODAY.
Despite the Titans’ outbreak and other flare-ups across the league that caused much consternation and shuffling of the game schedule that affected 10 teams, the NFL hasn’t been forced to implement more aggressive measures such as bubbles because it has largely been able to stay the course with the approach of securing team facilities and travel arrangements with strict protocols enveloped by daily testing, contact tracing and other response procedures. That has worked well enough to complete the first six weeks of a 17-week regular season.
The latest league-wide testing results, announced Tuesday by the league and NFL Players Association, cited just eight new positive tests among 2,459 players, a scant positivity rate of 0.3%, during the week of Oct. 11-17. The rate for coaches and other personnel was even lower (0.2%) with 11 new positives among 5,340 people tested.
Yet warning signs of potential disaster are ubiquitous, a reason Commissioner Roger Goodell keeps preaching about the sins of complacency in mitigating risks.
That’s why I’d think it would make perfect sense for the NFL to institute a playoff bubble approach.
After all, the NBA, WNBA and NHL crowned champions recently after resuming their seasons inside bubbles. And Major League Baseball, after experiencing several pandemic-related disruptions in the initial weeks of its season that began in July, made it to the
World Series beginning Tuesday night after instituting bubbles in San Diego and Arlington, Texas, since the start of the divisional playoffs.
Remember the words of Payton, who worked with general manager Mickey Loomis to formulate a Saints training camp bubble at the Loews in downtown New Orleans as it became apparent during the summer that the bubble of the NBA and the other leagues could serve the intended purpose.
“You think the week before the AFC and NFC Championship Games, teams are going to allow someone to test positive?” Payton told USA TODAY during training camp. “Teams are going to demand that Loews of their own. And it won’t be a ‘soft’ quarantine. It’ll be a hard bubble. Man, nobody’s going to miss the Super Bowl because of COVID.”
Payton did not respond to a recent interview request, but several coaches and executives were open-minded to the idea of “local” bubbles that would involve teams being secluded in their home cities during the playoffs, rather than “regionalized” bubbles that was discussed and discarded this year by league officials.
Like the Saints, the Cowboys also used a local bubble – at a hotel adjacent
to the team’s headquarters – that players could voluntarily opt to access.
“I can see the benefit,” an NFL coach told USA TODAY under the condition of anonymity. The person did not want to be identified because he is not intimately involved in such discussions and planning at the league level. “I don’t think we need it, but I’m not opposed to do it for a short period of time.”
A short period that would be a postseason window as the league expands its playoff field to 14 teams.
For many years, it has been typical for teams to sequester at hotels before home games; a playoff bubble would be an extension of that layered on top of the measures that have existed at team headquarters all season.
Yet Sills cautions against viewing bubbles as a 100% safeguard. And with “local” bubbles, the highest risk that concerns NFL teams – travel, on airplanes and buses – would still exist for teams needing to hit the road for playoff games. That, in addition to other risks.
“The bubble is not foolproof,” Sills told reporters last week. “It doesn’t take away the need for all of our other mitigation strategies. In fact, infection can spread more rapidly inside a bubble if it does get introduced, because everyone
is together in very close quarters.”
Sills said that one of the things the NFL has learned from other experiences is that non-team personnel needed to administer a bubble, including service workers and security, also add an element of risk. He is also mindful of the mental and emotional toll that existence in a bubble could involve.
Still, you’d think that support personnel working a bubble could be tested. And unlike an extended period in a bubble – such as what the NBA endured and what would have been involved with a bubble during the NFL regular season – a playoff window seems palatable.
It’s also much more likely that the NFL Players Association would sign off on playoff bubbles, given that stage of the season and the postseason revenue involved, two people with knowledge of talks between the league and players union told USA TODAY under the condition of anonymity. The persons did not want to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
“The shorter the window, the better,” one of the executives said.
It may come down to classic bigbusiness analysis: cost versus risk.