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Analysis: NFL, NFLPA Agrees to CBA Amendments for the 2020 Season
(9:45)
Sports were supposed to be our reward.
If we did things right as a country and if we let science rule and we were good teammates in the community and if our leaders avoided silly and avoidable failures like not wearing masks and not adhering to critical health standards, then maybe Once, when the end of summer comes, there would be joy in Mudville and Green Bay, and, well, you get an idea.
If the numbers were decreasing and the curve was flat, and if evidence were available across the country with results produced in hours rather than days, then we could invent a scenario where September would be filled with a daily cornucopia of professional sports. on tap, almost all day, from the NBA to the NHL to the MLB to the NFL.
But unfortunately we are nowhere near the alleged standards that were set in March, and COVID-19 is wreaking havoc at hot spots across the country. The fears are already confirmed because Major League Baseball, which, like soccer, is causing teams to travel across the United States and doesn’t have a strict bubble of any kind, couldn’t make it through its first weekend of seasonal play. Regular without the virus running rampant among the Miami Marlins. It got to the point where a game has already been canceled and its season already seems compromised.
Friends, this is not pessimism. This is not rooting against sports. This is our reality. Like a country For sports leagues. And for sports fans. As someone who feeds his family by reporting, writing, and talking about the NFL 12 months a year, and who spends four hours a day on the radio commenting on sports, this is the last thing he wants. No one wants games to parse and the moves and transactions on the list are obsessed with more than me. But I also watch the news and read the newspaper, and sport is anything but immune to what happens in Texas and Arizona and Florida and Georgia and in many other states where professional soccer is played.
It is not rooting against sports: it is affirming what has always been obvious, it is shooting people directly. Frustration is being expressed over the lackluster national response to the worst pandemic in more than 100 years, which would always make the company of trying to play these sports a miracle, or something like that. This is wishing you had responded differently. This is wishing that this had not seemed inevitable all along, given the lack of a collective response outside of the individually facing states and cities.
“If you have an eight-game schedule somewhere on Park Ave. (in the NFL league office), now might be a good time to let us know,” an AFC team executive said this morning as news of the MLB’s first major COVID. -19 spread of outbreak.
“I never understood the race for people to return to our buildings with the season that doesn’t start until September,” said another senior team official. “And are we playing 16 games on this? Really?”
That is why some GMs I have spoken to believed that 10 or 12 games would be the maximum. That’s why another general manager recently caught himself talking about “when” the season begins, and quickly changed it to “yes.”
Even a sport in a bubble, like MLS in Orlando, had to send teams home before the tournament really started, if you remember. Things are going well now, but chaos reigned early with scraped matches at the last minute. And the NFL, titan of all sports, is nowhere near a bubble stage and the scale of its performance is exponentially greater than anything MLB is trying. There is no truncated season. Do not travel alone within certain divisions. A complete 16-week calendar, at least so far.
The prospect of ending a five-month campaign never seemed realistic to the soccer people he spoke to regularly during the offseason. And he feels more than ambitious right now. Naive? Wrong? Silly at heart?
Choose the adjective that you think feels most appropriate. Up to this point, the NFL has been unwilling to entertain anything other than the norm, at least publicly. But within the nine-page note the NFLPA sent to players and agents on Sunday includes a subsection that belies the fact that job and property executives realize that even the reworked training camp company can make more sense in theory than in practice.
From the NFLPA memo:
“Item 7b: Cancellation stipend prior to roster reduction. Article i. – For players on the 90-player roster at the time of cancellation and who earned a credited 2019 season or Draft 2020 selections: $ 250,000 stipend , health insurance for NFL players. Item ii. – For players without credited 2019 and 2020 season without draft: $ 50,000 stipend. “
Teams can choose to cut 90 players now, or wait until August, but regardless, the worst-case scenario for the NFL and its players is already sold out. And it would have been ridiculous, given what is happening in this country’s hospitals and what MLB is already dealing with, so that those terms have not been negotiated. Determining how to handle the economy of a shortened or aborted NFL season was one of the last big lingering problems in these months of talks, and it seems highly likely that it is one of the most important pieces of the union deal.
And if, in fact, a national company as comprehensive as the NFL, which needs thousands upon thousands of people to maintain it weekly, doesn’t work, should anyone paying close attention to COVID-19 in this country be surprised? There is no one to blame within the sport or the union. If anything, the NFL and NFLPA should be recommended for doing the job they did, very quietly and productively and in a much more professional way than in the major leagues, even to get to this point.
But it was always contingent on compliance with certain medical standards and virus containment, and testing and tracing helped pull cities and states out of the abyss. And that simply has not been the case. Not even close. This is not being negative; it’s just shooting in a straight line and following the numbers, listening to the meds, and now watching baseball where the Marlins and Orioles (their next projected opponent) hang in limbo, as well as the Phillies (who welcomed the Marlins this weekend). week) and the Yankees (who were ready to visit Philadelphia). Not to mention the referee teams involved, and anyone else who staffed that Marlins / Phillies series.
The tentacles extend outward, quickly and, if anything, the largest number of people involved in the daily staging of NFL practices and games, the most extreme travel, the massive size of training staff (rivaling a MLB roster) which includes many around the world. At 60 years old, and the fact that many of the players weigh more than 300 pounds and are more vulnerable to the virus, it seems to herald even greater challenges for what the NFL is trying to accomplish.
Creating such a big bubble is impossible … but it is also precisely the reason why one should prepare so that the gross totals of positive tests are much higher than other sports. And with the families and friends of the players interacting with them, and with the outside world, and without an established standard of regulations regarding the use of masks from state to state, among other preventive measures, the NFL going through a season has always seemed be the worst loser. of everything.
The 69 Jets and Joe Namath had better odds.
This is a crisis beyond the control of the NFL, which does not improve as we get closer to the start. Leaving it as what amounts to a sports corporation to navigate this unprecedented medical emergency, with no appearance of a unified response within the country, was always fraught with danger. With billions at stake, and players in a sport where careers end in an instant, there’s plenty of motivation to move on.
But at some point, perhaps very soon, something more than a 16 game schedule may be in order. This virus is undefeated in totally reshaping the way all other sports have been forced to operate, and it had a massive impact on both volume and location of games. Expecting the NFL to be different, somehow exceptional for COVID-19, never made much sense, and once the training facilities finally begin to fill up this week, that will be more obvious than ever.
