COVID Proved the NFL Can Be Efficient When It Wants To Be
So, I was wrong.
In July I said not playing football would be better than winning a Super Bowl with a pandemic asterisk. Then, in October I said the season felt like it was on the verge of being a complete disaster.
I’m still not quite sure how they managed it, but instead, the NFL is on the verge of completing an entire season in the middle of a pandemic with no real impact on competitive integrity.
It’s honestly astounding. Since this league became America’s favorite pastime, the NFL has seemingly haplessly bumbled through every social, political, and football controversy it has encountered. Big issues and small issues, they’ll mishandle them all. They perpetually run the gamut—pinballing around from pretending concussions aren’t bad, to ruining three entire weeks of a season with fake cartoon refs, to blackballing Colin Kaepernick.
For decades, they’ve felt like a league that lucked into being the single most popular thing in the nation and had no idea what to do with it. But despite all their structural and sociopolitical ineptitude, they had an addictive product and knew how to market it. Sometimes that’s all it takes to erase a whole lot of not-good.
Then a global pandemic hit. Putting the NFL in scramble mode is typically a recipe for disaster of unprecedented proportions. Frankly, I fully expected a league of constant outbreaks and a season that either barely crawled to the finish line or gave up the ghost 10 weeks in. Yet, here we are, about to play a Super Bowl after a season with zero canceled games.
There were positive tests, quarantined players and coaches, and the Titans had a full-on outbreak. But the season progressed far smoother than I think anyone could have rationally argued was possible, given what we saw out of every other professional league that had a COVID season before the NFL.
Even the viewing experience felt mostly normal. The fake crowd noise seemed awful in theory, but was exactly the right move. I’d imagine the live experience in empty stadiums was surreal, but the action on television felt no different than it did any other season.
The only signals that anything was out of the ordinary were the camera shots of stands filled with cardboard cutouts or nobody at all. Outside of that, during football, all that was letting me know what a difficult time we were in came from the billion-dollar corporations reminding me we’re in this together every other commercial. “Together as one human race, we will beat this virus. But NOTHING WILL BEAT THESE PRICES!”
I said Super Bowl LV would be won with asterisks. Instead, it feels mostly normal. Nothing about this championship feels tainted by the pandemic outside of the way everything feels tainted by the pandemic. The game itself is relatively unscathed, minus one close shave.
In a matter of months, the NFL cobbled together a system to complete a full season without a bubble that not only worked, but evolved and changed as the season progressed to function smoother and with less room for error. That’s 32 teams each making eight two-way trips crisscrossing the entire US. That’s the NFL getting an entire league of players and coaches (mostly) following COVID protocols to keep their league afloat.
We know now, with certainty, the NFL isn’t as stupid as their past failures suggest. COVID pushed the league into a corner few thought it could escape, but it did. When its money was on the line, the NFL suddenly operated with a fevered regiment that put many other institutions in the country, public or private, to shame.
All it takes for the billionaire cabal of football barons to operate with immediate ruthless efficiency is the threat to their bottom line a global pandemic presents. A stark contrast to the way they've handled nearly everything else from concussions to player protests of social injustice. The next time they start to haplessly bumble, remember it’s not because they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s because they don’t care.
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