‘The perfect storm for virus transmission’: Why football is struggling to lift off | Opinion
Football season is struggling mightily to lift off in the pandemic year 2020. We are seeing it in the NFL and we are seeing it at the college level, and it is not the least bit surprising.
We should have all seen this coming.
Football in the fall is chugging at us like a malignant locomotive.
That the NFL and college game are still planning to play at all with schedules including travel, even in stadiums with few or no fans, lends a whole new shade of meaning to the idea this is a “dangerous sport.”
Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter, the new president of the NFL Players Association, wrote this in a recent communique with the league’s players: “More than any other sport, the game of football is the perfect storm for virus transmission.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned the same, saying players, coaches and staff must be isolated in an “enclosed community” to safely play this season. And it’s common sense.
Amid a coronavirus/COVID-19 plague not nearly contained, in a time when “social distancing” is a part of the lexicon, football oppositely demands close and violent contact. There isn’t a single play where sweat isn’t flying and bodies aren’t colliding.
Health and safety “protocols” are fine (when followed) and frequent testing is fine; still, what Tretter said is true, and the danger is magnified by by travel, by airports, hotels and other stadiums — things outside that “closed community.”
That is why MLB’s restart has struggled with players testing positive (led dubiously by the Miami Marlins) in a way we have not seen in the NBA or NHL, which both are hermetically sealed in hub cities to avoid travel and limit players’ outside contact with others.
Football is not only following MLB’s riskier path, but is unavoidably a contact sport, and also one with a significantly larger number of players, coaches and staff.
The sport’s liftoff if fraying around the country.
Sixty NFL players, equal to one entire team, had opted out of the 2020 season as of early Thursday, ahead of the league’s arbitrary 4 p.m. deadline. Twenty-eight of the 32 teams had taken an opt-out hit, with the Patriots losing eight players and the Browns four.
This week the Miami Dolphins saw their first two opt-outs in receivers Allen Hurns and Albert Wilson.
“Because of this crazy time,” said Wilson, “I choose to put my family in the best situation I see fit.”
Good for him. Good for all of the athletes who have had a personal reckoning with priorities as the number of U.S. virus deaths tops 162,000, and experts warn the threat will continue well into football season.
Meantime, across town, the Miami Hurricanes open full fall practice Friday and released their 11-game 2020 schedule, including five road trips.
Because nothing stops football, right?
Neither a pandemic nor common sense shall sideline King Sport!
College football continuing potentially seems even riskier than the NFL, for the simple reason college-age players are less likely to be family men and more likely to find it impossible to not socialize.
Maybe that’s why two smaller football conferences — the Ivy League and Centennial Conference — already have canceled their seasons, and why this week UConn became the first FBS-level school to opt out of the coming season.
Maybe that’s why Pac-12 football players have banded together to make safety and other demands of their conference, and now Big Ten players have done the same.
Maybe that’s why most leagues at least have pared down to conference-only schedules or limited schedules in other ways.
It seems inevitable the NFL and college game will go ahead with their seasons, because too much money is in play not to. College football, especially, is a revenue machine that sustains entire programs, essentially paying for non-revenue sports, which are the vast majority.
Both the pro and college game can afford to go on with few or no fans this season, however, because TV revenue fattens the wallet more than ticket revenue does.
That is especially so in the NFL, where around 75 percent of the league’s $15 billion in annual revenue comes from national broadcast rights, primarily, and also sponsorship deals and merchandise. Teams are far less reliant on local revenue via ticket sales than teams in other professional sports.
Estimates are NFL revenue would take around a $3 billion overall hit (20 percent) if there are no fans at games this season. That isn’t nothing, but football can survive it.
No fans in football stadiums this fall would send a positive — and needed — message that we are not past this virus threat yet, and might not be for a long time unless more of us start taking it more seriously.
