How did the NFL get this far without a plan?
Training camp is supposed to be starting and nobody knows what's going on
*Photo courtesy of the Minnesota Vikings
Twitter exploded on Sunday morning with dozens of NFL stars posting statements about the NFL’s lack of clear plan going forward for training camp.
JJ Watt published the most detailed summation of what’s happening.
He wrote:
“The NFL can mandate that players show up to training camp regardless if any agreement has been reached by the NFL and NFLPA.”
“We still have not been granted the full and proper training camp acclimation period necessary as recommended by the medical and training staffs.”
“We still do not know if there will be daily testing, every other day testing etc.”
“We still do not know if there will be preseason games or not.”
“We still do not know how a positive COVID test will be handled in regards to others in close contact (in the huddle, directly engaged with etc.)
“A strong and fair opt-out clause for those at higher risk or those with family members at higher risk has not been agreed upon.”
“If players do not show up they can be fined or considered in breach of contract, even if health and safety protocols have not been agreed upon or Infectious Disease Emergency Response plans have been met.
On the final point in Watt’s post: NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reports that teams have submitted infectious disease emergency response plans but the union has to approve them in order for teams to allow more than 20 players in the building. According to the Washington Post, some of the teams’ plans have been approved.
The NFLPA is looking for a plan that would allow players to have a period of workouts to get back in shape before non-padded practices and then ramp up to the season with just two weeks of contact practices. They do not want preseason games, whereas the NFL reportedly is aiming to play two preseason games. There is also concern over the safety of camp in some COVID “hot spot” states like Arizona, California and Florida.
Rookies are supposed to report on Tuesday, quarterbacks on Thursday and the rest of the team on July 28. Jason La Canfora of CBS reached out to agents for rookies and veterans and reported that “everything is still in limbo.”
The most likely scenario remains that the union and league find middle ground — as they did in recent CBA negotiations — and training camp begins at some point soon. But if that doesn’t happen, it’s worth asking: What took so long, NFL?
All summer long we watched as the NBA, WNBA, MLS, NASCAR and (even after lots of fighting back and forth) MLB all came to agreements on plans to return to action. Why did the NFL wait until the final hour?
The NFL had months to study other leagues’ plans, look at what worked and what didn’t work and form an outline for players to return after missing offseason workouts, OTAs and minicamp. They had months to work together with the NFLPA on every element of the 2020 season — including the financial elements to deal with an expected $4 billion loss.
The NFL has a unique challenge in comparison to other leagues. As my pal Charles McDonald of the NY Daily News said on the Purple Insider podcast: If you designed a sport to purposefully spread COVID, it would be football. The NBA and WNBA can create bubbles. Soccer can create bubbles and have mini tournaments. Baseball can socially distance while playing. Football requires close contact from 90 players during camp with dozens of coaches — many of whom are in the riskiest age group.
Measures like avoiding jersey swaps at the end of games and helmets with shields that limit spittle are dandy but it’s going to take a far more monumental effort to keep COVID from getting into team facilities and spreading throughout teams. Rams left tackle Andrew Whitworth said that one family member contracted COVID and everyone in his family got sick. Imagine that on a much greater scale.
Albert Breer of MMQB reports that some teams have suggested delaying the season because they feel that beginning camp now (camp has to take at least 47 days, per the CBA) just isn’t feasible and the start of the year should be delayed but the NFL hasn’t been receptive to that idea.
This entire clusterbleep smacks of football mentality bleeding over into something that needs to be handled as scientifically as possible. Football is always about the next man up, playing through adversity, pressing forward no matter what. But you can’t out-football a potentially deadly or career-altering virus.
With a CBA set and no future battle on the horizon, this also wasn’t the time to treat this situation like a tug-of-war for leverage. Things like dollars lost to preseason rights deals with local TV stations or the number of practices that coaches demand in order to have their squad prepare will ultimately be negligible in the long run. The sole focus of the league needed to be creating a clear-cut plan to make players feel that their safety was the most important thing.
And based on history, who could blame players for being skeptical?
It’s worth pointing out again that the NFL can, per the CBA, force its players to show up. But it has been also reported that the CBA doesn’t have a force majeure clause, which means players get paid whether there are games or not.
In any normal negotiation, we would have no choice but to wait until the two sides find middle ground. But in this case, COVID has taught us that half measures don’t really work. Middle ground could be dangerous.
So — in similar fashion to the rest of the world’s future — we will have to wait and see. Unlike in the ugly baseball negotiations that stole two-thirds of their season, there seems to be great interest from both sides in playing football this year. We can all hope they find a way to do so safely.
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I am of two minds on the concept of Covid-19 being relatively worse for the NFL than for other sports. On one hand, yes, if you were to design a sport to spread Covid, it would be football.
However, if you were to design a sport that could WITHSTAND the OUTBREAK of Covid within the league it would also be football.
Look to the NBA. What would happen if Lebron got Covid before the upcoming playoff season? Does anyone honestly think that the NBA could proceed and try a NFL style "next man up" mantra with any success? The NBA is a clear player-driven league, where a handful of players are virtually indispensable to getting fans to watch. Conversely, the NFL is a TEAM oriented league, and it is BUILT around the mantra of "next man up," for better or worse. No one is calling 2017 a sham year for the Eagles even though 6 of the starting NFL QBs (including arguably two or three of the top five QBs overall that year) were injured and out for the majority of the year in Carson Palmer, Andrew Luck, Deshaun Watson, Aaron Rodgers, Sam Bradford, and Ryan Tannenhill, AND where the overall presumptive MVP for that year (Wentz) got injured right before the playoffs.
Also, the NFL is "lucky" in that their schedule would result in many positive tests only requiring a player to miss a single game. Of the 7 days in a week, a positive test on only 3 of them (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) would REQUIRE a player to miss two games. If a player tests positive on any of the other four days, the 10 day quarantine period would expire before two games pass (unless there was a Thursday game in the 2nd week), though in some cases a lack of in-facility practice may result in the player missing a second game anyway. Of course, a player could take longer than 10 days to recover, but then the vast majority of young people with good cardiovascular health (i.e., every player in the NFL - that people with high BMI do worse with covid is a bit of a false red flag, as BMI usually indicates poor cardiovascular health which is why it is hard for this cardiovascular virus, and NFL offensive linemen have uncommonly fantastic cardiovascular health for their BMI) are expected to recover within that 10 days. Comparatively, if a baseball player tests positive that player will miss, what, 8 games? Four games for the NBA? Five games for the NHL?
Also, being as Covid spreads largely through breath, the NFL is better equipped than other sports to incorporate an effective mask, in the unlikely event that the NFL suddenly becomes shockingly proactive on this. The idea of having a mask in the NBA or in the MLS is laughable, and it is hard to envision for the MLB as well. However, it would take minor innovation (though it would be shockingly preemptive) to modify NFL masks such that they ventilate much like current military helmets can. Probably won't happen, frankly, but still it could for the NFL in ways that it can't for any other sport but hockey.
From the beginning, I think many of us who are NFL fans recognized a couple of things: 1) The nature of football would make it extremely difficult to play safely this year; 2) The nature of the NFL, its owners, its leaders (insanely greedy and money-focused, amoral at best) would make it even more difficult and likely impossible.
I think we're seeing that play out now and will continue to. The NFL could have come up with more defined plans, but the fact is there probably are no plans that are good enough to keep the players safe, and the owners/managers know that because they are not dumb. Thus we get non-plans or absurd peripheral plans like not swapping jerseys--forms of hand waving at the fundamental issues--and the hope that they can force the players to play, at least for awhile, and salvage some revenue.
This moment was predictable, but is still disgusting, and I think the most likely scenarios are folding up the season within the first few weeks or the season not beginning at all, and either way some people dying because the NFL wanted to make money and prioritized some possibility of that happening over everything else, just like it always does.