Opinion | The NFL has no idea what it’s doing

Joe Perrino, Sports Editor

The NFL has gotten extremely lucky over the past several months. Its season ended just before the COVID-19 pandemic began and it hasn’t had to worry about starting up during quarantine. Well, now it’s September, and the NFL is slated to begin its season Sept. 10 – and it seems football is continuing as normal.

In July, the NFL elected to cancel the four weeks of preseason games it usually holds before the regular season begins, but made zero change to the regular season schedule. Teams have been holding training camps and preparing for upcoming games, but that’s pretty much all we know.

Most professional sports leagues have been very transparent about their detailed plans to bring their sport back to the public. However, the NFL has said barely anything about their plans. Are organizations going to allow fans? If so, how full will the stadiums be? Are the players going to be kept track of at all times? Will we even have football? 

Here’s the thing, though – it’s this disorganized mess that so many football fans have become accustomed to over the past few years. It starts at the top.

Commissioner Roger Goodell doesn’t seem to have much of a clue as to how to relate to his players and run a functional league. The disconnect continues down. The team owners, for the most part, don’t have their players’ interests at heart. 

For example, take Washington’s owner Dan Snyder – someone who had been so unwilling to change his team's former name, the Redskins, despite outcry from a large cluster of the football community due its racist undertones. Then, their biggest sponsor, FedEx, threatened to disassociate itself from the team so long as its name was the Redskins, which, by the way, would cost Washington $45 million for the season. Ta-da! Three days later, they changed their name, but they couldn’t even come up with a new mascot. Now they’re known for an entire season as the “Washington Football Team.” This is, in fact, real life.

This is just one of the examples of poor ownership in the NFL, but these regularly occurring circumstances are what caused this spiral into confusion. 

Let’s say, hypothetically, business continues as usual. There’s 22 players on the field at any moment in time, most of them being in close quarters, spitting and sweating all over each other. The coaches and bench players are together all game on the sideline. And the league expects players to confine themselves to their team hotel and not have any contact with the outside world. 

It’s rather similar to the MLB situation, which led three teams to have widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in their clubhouses. While the MLB has returned back to normal for now, NFL franchises have even larger rosters, which will inevitably lead to more exposure.

Now, if these teams end up hosting fans in their stadiums, that’ll prove for an interesting storyline. Many teams in the NFL have outright stated that they will not host fans for at least the first two games or month of the season. However, there are a gaggle of teams in limbo. Five teams have confirmed they will start the season hosting fans from anywhere between 20% to 25% seating capacity. Another handful of teams will wait for a few weeks to determine how they will roll out seating plans.

I wonder how they’re going to handle lawsuits from fans whose entire “pod” as they like to say, tests positive. There’s this feeling of a really brutal storm brewing over Goodell’s house, ready for a lightning bolt to strike and take away football, just like how almost everything else has been taken in 2020.