The Packers, an NFL Schedule and a Pandemic
GREEN BAY, Wis. – The NFL released its 2020 schedule on Thursday night amid a backdrop of uncertainty caused by a global pandemic. It’s been 58 days and counting since the NBA scuttled its season; will the NFL be able to kick off its season in 125 days?
On the surface, the schedule looked about the same as any other schedule. For the Green Bay Packers, they’ll open with a pair of games against NFC North rivals for the third consecutive year. If the league was truly concerned about having to cut the 16-game season down to 14 or 12, it could have created a four-week block of NFC vs. AFC games that easily could have been eliminated. It chose not to do so.
That doesn’t mean the schedule is chiseled in granite, though.
A “main takeaway from how the schedule was constructed is that if a delayed start is necessary, the NFL’s preference appears to be moving parts of the schedule and still playing a complete 16-game slate rather than shortening the length of the season,” Sports Illustrated’s Jenny Vrentas wrote. “Blocks of nonconference games, for example, would have been the obvious way to easily allow for a section of the schedule to collapse from 16 to 12 games. But that is not the direction the NFL chose to go. There are clear reasons why the league would prefer to rearrange, rather than eliminate, revenue-generating games.”
Creating a fair schedule is a colossal undertaking under the best of circumstances. Not only does the league want to eliminate competitive nightmares such as a team playing on one coast on a Sunday and the opposite coast on a Thursday, to choose an obvious one, but it is peppered with requests from teams.
That undertaking was made even more difficult as the league built in subtle ways to adapt its schedule to the realities of an invisible menace. As noted by the Los Angeles Times’ Sam Farmer, among others, “Every game in Week 2 pits teams who have the same off week. … That way, if that week of games had to be postponed, all of those games could be made up during the respective off weeks of those teams.”
For the most part, Packers coach Matt LaFleur couldn’t be too mad at the schedule. It’s on the road for back-to-back weeks only once, for instance, though it’s at a bye-week disadvantage for two divisional matchups. Rather than a front-loaded home schedule, like last season, the Packers will have a chance to take advantage of its built-in cold-weather edge.
However, the schedule isn’t perfect; it probably was impossible to make everyone happy. The Packers, for instance, requested to be on the road for Week 3 (the weekend of the Ryder Cup, which will be contested about an hour south of Green Bay) and Week 4 (Lambeau Field is hosting Wisconsin vs. Notre Dame on that Saturday). The league granted the first of those requests but not the second, though that Week 4 game against Atlanta will at least be played on a Monday.
“The release of the NFL schedule is something our fans eagerly anticipate every year, as they look forward with hope and optimism to the season ahead,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “In preparing to play the season as scheduled, we will continue to make our decisions based on the latest medical and public health advice, in compliance with government regulations, and with appropriate safety protocols to protect the health of our fans, players, club and league personnel, and our communities.
“We will be prepared to make adjustments as necessary, as we have during this offseason in safely and efficiently conducting key activities such as free agency, the virtual offseason program, and the 2020 NFL draft.”
For all of Vrentas’ story at SI.com, CLICK HERE.
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