Ann Killion

Can the NFL make it through a season under coronavirus cloud?

The NFL has finally arrived at its moment of truth.

Time to play in a pandemic.

Will it be smooth? Rocky? Interrupted?

“This is an unprecedented thing that we are going through, with the state of this pandemic,” 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said. “I definitely expect things to happen. You’ve got to be ready to adjust.”

For seven months, as the rest of the sports world shuttered, bubbled, squabbled, swabbed, quarantined, postponed and stressed, the NFL sat back and watched.

Sure, the league had to hold its draft virtually. And yes, offseason training programs were canceled. But the Teflon league was largely unaffected as it watched the rest of the sports world argue about science, bleed out millions of dollars, and struggle with how to conduct business in the age of the coronavirus.

“The NFL has this incredible luxury due to timing,” Villanova law professor Andrew Brandt, a former NFL executive, told me in April. “The calendar suits them well. They can wait and watch other leagues. It gives them a blueprint.”

The blueprint includes — as the absolute necessity — testing: frequent, accurate testing. And in the months since the coronavirus first shut down professional American sports, testing has improved.

“There have been technological advances, things we couldn’t do last March,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at UC Berkeley. “If you use frequent testing with as fast a turnaround as possible, you can minimize the number of cases.

“I think the NFL has a shot at (succeeding). Because we’ve learned a lot about how to make this work.”

There are still a lot of variables in play, however. The NFL involves vastly more people than any other team sport that has successfully held games. Each roster has 53 players. Each home team will involve approximately 150 additional staff including security, grounds crew, football operations, public relations staff and medical personnel. Each visiting team will bring approximately 70 field staff in addition to the 53man roster. Meaning that each game will involve in excess of 320 people. And at least the 22 of them on the field will not be socially distancing.

All of these personnel — who fall into Tier 1 and Tier 2 groups — will be tested daily, except for game day.

Thus far, the NFL prevented coronavirus outbreaks throughout training camps. The league announced Sept. 1 that of 58,621 tests conducted, just four players and six others tested positive.

Training camps were not held in a bubble, though in many ways they have always been conducted within a kind of invisible barrier. Players are trying hard to make a roster. Some are living in nearby hotels. There is a sense of selfcontainment.

Will that change now that the regular season has started? Once those first paychecks have been cut? Once a work routine settles in?

What we have learned in the pandemic is that professional athletes, unlike college players, have a good reason to adhere to protocols: a paycheck.

“They have a financial incentive,” Swartzberg said. “This is their careers, and they’ve been working a long time for this. There’s much greater impetus to behave than with college students.”

Travel has been a problem for sports, as baseball found out when it was forced to cancel games and quarantine teams — including the A’s and Giants — on the road. The NFL travel is far more controlled: Teams usually leave the day before a game, return home a few hours after the game ends, travel in a charter plane, and have private entrances and exits in airports. Their biggest risk may come in hotels, for one night, or if players choose to leave their hotels.

“The NFL has got some real advantages there,” Swartzberg said.

Swartzberg’s optimism about a successful season extends only onto the field of play. He thinks the concept of allowing fans into the games right now is wildly misguided. In an incoherent policy, Commissioner Roger Goodell is allowing a small handful of teams to have fans while the vast majority (26, including the 49ers) cannot, at least to begin the season.

“I think it’s irresponsible,” Swartzberg said. “Frankly it shouldn’t be allowed.”

Most epidemiologists still forecast a virus second wave — or whatever one calls another surge when the first one was never over — sometime in the autumn.

Swartzberg expects to see an uptick in postLabor Day cases in a few weeks — just as we saw about a month after Memorial Day. He worries about both the winter influenza season and the environmental impact of fires making people who get the coronavirus potentially much sicker. He worries about the risks of opening college campuses, creating hot spots, and the added risks of closing them back down and sending exposed individuals out into many communities. He worries about COVID fatigue that will make people behave in less responsible ways as summer gives way to fall.

And he worries about what we don’t know.

“We learn something new about this virus every two to four weeks,” he said.

Swartzberg notes that individuals under 20 years old are far less likely to get extremely sick, but he is concerned about longterm heart issues that are being reported, even for young athletes who have no or mild symptoms.

“And elite athletes could be stressing their hearts,” Swartzberg said. Many NFL athletes have underlying health issues. The average weight of an NFL lineman is in excess of 320 pounds, which qualifies many as morbidly obese, a preexisting condition that should raise an alarm.

The odds of the virus infiltrating the NFL teams remain high. If and when that happens, then what? NFL teams can’t play doubleheaders, baseball’s solution to its scheduling problems. The NFL has little wiggle room in its methodical march to 16 regularseason games to accommodate illness or quarantine.

“Everyone’s going to do as good as they can,” Shanahan said. “You’re expecting things to happen and when it does you just deal with it the best you can.”

Like everyone else, the NFL is holding its breath, crossing its fingers and hoping to make it through.