NFL's Optics on Pandemic Are Bad & Not Just Because of its Treatment of Broncos
Fans are understandably upset and frustrated with the NFL's decision to force the Denver Broncos to play the New Orleans Saints on Sunday without any of their four quarterbacks.
However, what's worse for the NFL are the optics of how it has been handling COVID-19 to begin with. The league's behavior, thus far, sends a message that it will avoid playing a 'Week 18' in the regular season.
The best example isn't even with the Broncos. It's with the Baltimore Ravens.
As everyone knows by now, the Ravens game with the Steelers, scheduled to be played Thanksgiving, was postponed until Sunday after reports of multiple positive tests for COVID-19 among players and coaches. The game was postponed, again, until Tuesday when more positive tests came through.
The NFL has since moved the game another day to Wednesday.
As of Sunday morning, yet another Ravens player has tested positive, which brings the total positive cases among players to 11. There are 20 total players who were placed on the reserve/COVID-19 list for either testing positive or being in close contact with a positive case.
In other words, the Ravens have a COVID-19 outbreak and that begs the question: Why should Baltimore even play this week at all and risk exposure to another team?
To be clear, I'm not talking about how unfair it is to the Ravens to not have multiple players — among them, reigning MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson — able to play. In fact, any player who has tested positive for COVID-19 can't practice or play for at least 10 days after the positive test, unless they are symptomatic, meaning Jackson and other players could miss at least two games.
Keep in mind that the scheduling changes have also impacted the Steelers. Even with their next game moved to Monday, they have a short week leading to that game, then another short week.
I can’t imagine Broncos fans being happy if they were in that situation, so you can imagine what Steelers fans are thinking — and in this case, Pittsburgh is a Super Bowl contender with an influential owner, getting a bad deal despite not having an outbreak.
So why is the NFL is moving forward with this game despite a team clearly going through an outbreak?
Of course, it's not hard to figure out what happens if the NFL decides to move the game to Week 18 — it has to answer the question as to why they would accommodate two teams in this fashion, even if its reasons are legitimate when it hasn't handled previous games in a similar manner.
There is a perception that the NFL is making it up as it's going along, leaving people confused as to why certain accommodations are made in one instance but not another. To be fair to the NFL, it has changed its protocol because of the nationwide increase in COVID-19 cases and reports that players and coaches alike aren't always following protocols.
But it still doesn't shatter the perception of inconsistency with the league's policies and enforcement. And that's a problem.
Furthermore, the NFL has historically been stubborn about not postponing or canceling games in other instances. The most infamous might be when the NFL refused to postpone games after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, particularly after Major League Baseball did so. And it took a lot of public pressure to get the NFL to postpone games after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon in 2001.
But the NFL's mindset of "play on, no matter what" could come back to haunt it if more Ravens players test positive in the days leading up to the game — and especially if more test positive after the game, followed by Steelers players testing positive.
If the NFL is moving forward because it's worried about backlash from Broncos fans, or if it's not concerned about a team with slim to no playoff hopes for not having a quarterback for a game, then what happens if the worst fears do come to fruition and the Ravens-Steelers matchup leads to more positive cases? The backlash wouldn't just be from Broncos fans — it would be league-wide.
In short, the NFL, despite having had some success in weathering the early COVID-19 storm, continues to present bad optics with how it is handling certain situations. It goes beyond making the Broncos play without a quarterback — it could have serious repercussions on how likely players and coaches can trust the NFL when a team has an outbreak and the NFL decides to "play on, no matter what."
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