NFL on collision course with pandemic
It is, to steal the words of the legendary football announcer Keith Jackson, the granddaddy of them all.
Jackson was expressing his view of the historic Rose Bowl game, but you could use the same words to describe the upcoming collision between the mighty National Football League and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
This is truly the irresistible force versus the immovable object. Muscle vs. microbes.
The NFL is absolutely determined to go ahead full steam with its season, starting in September, while COVID-19 continues to kill people around the planet and has created confusion and division throughout the United States, where all of the NFL’s team are located.
If the NFL can pull this off, it will be a legendary feat for Roger Goodell’s administration and a testament to how football in America is the undisputed king of the castle.
If, by contrast, the coronavirus can force the NFL to change its plans, or somehow make it impossible to either start its season Sept. 10 or finish it in February with the Super Bowl, it will be a devastating medical and social achievement for a virus few had heard of four months ago.
Agreed, this is a curious way to evaluate a pandemic. The last thing front-line workers and those who have lost loved ones to COVID-19 likely care about is four-down football.
But professional sports take entertainment and games and elevate them to a sometimes perverse level at which they seem more important than they actually are. That’s why Patrick Mahomes gets paid more to fling footballs than a brilliant surgeon does to save lives.
What we’re all part of now is an effort to recover something of the lifestyle we all took for granted as recently as February. We look for small victories. Here in Ontario, that might mean the opening of golf courses soon. Music concerts organized via Zoom are viewed as innovative expressions of defiance against this terrible illness.
So if the powerful NFL can’t do business in the fall, it will be a stunning setback. It will be akin to Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson. An unthinkable upset. This is the NFL, after all, which has never been unable to crown a champion since 1920. This is the league that kept playing games in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. When the league decided it couldn’t play five days after 9/11, it tacked those games on the end of the regular season. Every game got played.
Stopping the NFL is close to impossible. The NHL and NBA can’t quite figure a way to complete their 2019-20 seasons or hold their annual drafts, and Major League Baseball can’t get the 2020 season started. But the NFL has held its draft will release a 17-week regular season schedule soon that envisions stadiums packed with fans. It plans on holding Super Bowl LV in Tampa on Feb. 7.
Yes, the coronavirus has already stopped both the English Premier League and Formula One racing in their tracks, not to mention Wimbledon and The Masters. But the NFL is relentlessly rolling forward.
There’s just doesn’t seem to be the same urgency about contingency plans for the NFL. The talk is about Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski in Tampa Bay, Stefon Diggs in Buffalo, and Aaron Rodgers working with his likely successor, Jordan Love, in Green Bay. It’s about Jarrett Stidham taking over under centre in New England, Jameis Winston in New Orleans and whether rookie Jedrick Wills can shift to left tackle in Cleveland and protect Baker Mayfield’s blind side.
As bad as things seem to be, would you bet against the NFL barging ahead with its season? I wouldn’t.
As we’ve seen over the years, particularly with the issue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and brain injuries, greed always wins over safety when it comes to the NFL. There’s also just enough junk science and general uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 to allow a determined business enterprise to argue any situation may not be as dangerous as the snowflakes suggest.
Also, the pressure is building within the Trump Universe to reopen states-regardless of what Dr. Anthony Fauci is saying. You’ve got armed protesters trying to force their way into legislatures to make that happen sooner than later, as well as crowds gathering in cities as though there was no pandemic at all.
For NFL owners, there are incredible profits to be made just by opening the doors and counting their television monies. They see their league as an unstoppable force representing American culture, part of the reason there’s such a strong representation of U.S military might at each and every game. NFL clubs love to put the camouflage on.
Players, meanwhile, are looking to get paid. NHLers and NBA players have their cheques from the 2019-20 season, but NFL players haven’t received a dime of their pay for this season. There’s pressure there, too.
Common sense says the virus will decide when it’s safe to bring back normal, and there’s no chance of a vaccine before the fall. But the NFL is a world unto itself at times and the money is so spectacularly enormous that logic may get bent to fit non-scientific priorities. There’s a lot of talk about safety and protecting the public, but the NFL has been demonstrating for a long time that it takes truly extraordinary circumstances to knock it out of business.
This unique and troubling virus may be up for that challenge.