The NFL Totally Gets How Corona Works
Good news guys. The NFL understands how diseases work. They don’t fear it. They understand it. All they have to do is make sure post-game interactions are minimal and that nobody swaps jerseys this season. That’ll keep our Covid from spreading. Yes. In a game filled with near constant human contact and heavy breathing, keeping the players from swapping jerseys will provide the security we need to make sure our football season goes smoothly. It just makes sense.
My belief that an NFL season will go down in flames if it even happens at all continues to be unwavering. Nothing that has happened in the past month has changed my mind that this is a good idea. The country is getting worse. The disease is spiking again. The people at the top continue to demand we risk pointless death so they can make even more money. Why is Disney open? Because the suits at the top (who are very financially secure) could conceivably shut the parks down and still pay everyone in the meantime have decided that no, they are going to risk their employees lives and the lives of every dumb shit who thinks masks are oppression and can’t wait another year to see Star Wars land because they want your money. Do not die for the mouse. People are literally going to die because they had to ride splash mountain one last time. It’s fucking depressing.
But that same dipshit capitalist “Money over Everything” mentality is going to give us a disaster of a football season at this rate. Instead of asking whether we should even have a football season (At this rate? no, we absolutely should not), they are trying to find these half-assed ways to take some some basic precautions and call it genuine sacrifice. Will keeping the players isolated work? Probably not. The NFL playerbase is just as full of self-important individualists as your average town. Many will take it seriously. Many others, like human turnstile Bobby Hart, will not. Those folks will be the reason infection breaches the bubbles and ruins it for everyone. College football is going to be even worse. We probably shouldn’t even be allowing colleges to open up, and kids without a developed sense of their own mortality will absolutely make this worse.
I don’t want a year without football. I miss sports. I hope desperately that enough people get their shit together and take this seriously enough soon enough to halt and handle the problem like many smarter countries have. But I just can’t see it happening right now. We’ve fucked it up so far, and we are still continuing to open up and fuck it up even harder. I’d rather lose football for a year than have another 100k+ Americans die and many many more saddled with mental, physiological, and emotional scars because a bunch of billionaires wanted to make even more money they don’t need.
My main concern for football isn’t just the close contact because the NBA has close contact. Honestly everyone has risk and can get long term problems from COVID-19. However in football; NFL or college d and o- lineman mainly have underlining conditions being obese. How many players may die because of this? I want football but not at the cost of lives. The NFL sounds like Trump trying to force schools open. Teachers are not paid enough. The big question is how many lives are they willing to risk which is just sad.
You forget to the billionaires it is all a game and how much money they is how they keep score.
I know shitting on the NFL is fun and all, but this is something jointly agreed on by the NFL and NFLPA.
oh well if the nflpa thinks its a good idea ?????????????
It means they think it will make them safeR. And they are right. It’s all about the viral load. Actually the bigger problem than the games themselves are the training rooms and why the NFL is unlikely to make it out of training camp. But in the event the NFL does clear training camp and we get actual games, the games themselves have two main likely points of infection. The lines and huddles. You can’t do anything about the lines if you want to play football. You can limit huddles. Players don’t need any more prolonged contact with each other to play the game and every prolonged interaction increases the risk of infection. Forbidding jersey swaps removes a potential point of infection. It isn’t a bad measure at all.
Removing jersey swaps isn’t a bad measure if it’s combined with other ones. But as pointed out in the comic above, just removing a post-game clothing swap doesn’t accomplish anything if they’re all over each other throughout a 3 hour game (and I question if you’ve watched much football if you think the lines and the huddles on field are the only times they are. Watch everything on the sidelines again, every celebration after a big play, every pile after a fumble of a gang tackle behind the line – every one of those is a point of spreading viral load, as is all the spitting that everyone who’s worked with football up close describes).
It isn’t contact that’s the problem. It’s sharing airspace for several minutes or more.
@anonymous you are really into distinctions without a difference
contact necessarily implies sharing airspace to some extent. cant really have one without the other
But playing games brings money, money to players, staff, owners, and the league. It is a risk that nets everyone a reward they want. Jersey Swaps do not. Just cause they take a risk in one place doesn’t mean you let risks at every turn be allowed.
in statistics what you just said is called “necessary but insufficient”
yes it makes them safer in that youve successfully eliminated 10% of viral transmission vectors
but it still does not remotely meet the threshold for mitigation of the other 90%
(yes im pulling these numbers out of my ass but it’s in service to my point: these are woefully ineffective measures that serve more to satisfy PR than science)
Obviously if your priority is safety you aren’t playing the games. There is nothing you can do about the risk that comes with playing short of not playing. But if you want to play and someone wants to pay you to play (or vice versa), there is nothing wrong with taking measures that while not eliminating the risk fully, at least reduces it.
ok
youll note in my previous comment that i made zero mention of “risk elimination”, because 1) as you said there is literally no such thing as zero risk, and 2) i was careful not to say that because i knew youd [rightly] hit me if i did
but you went ahead and hit me anyway despite my careful wording of “threshold for mitigation of the other 90%” and, once again, missed my point:
reduction is risk is necessary, but the steps agreed upon by nfl+nflpa are woefully insufficient. yes you should absolutely plug that fist-sized hole in the levee, but doing so and declaring victory while theres a house-sized chunk missing right next to it and a hurricane just offshore does not meet said threshold for mitigation
They’re still talking about what they’ll do and not do. Everything still isn’t settled yet, not on the health and safety side much less the money side. And even when it is, it’ll be in pencil at best. Right now I don’t believe football will kick off on schedule, if it even will at all this season
You say this as if the NFLPA has any real power when time and time again it has proven to be basically useless in negotiations
Maybe in other situations, but in this case they have an upper hand from a legal and public opinion standpoint. I think the players want to play just like everyone wants things to go back to normal, and the large number of young 21-26 year olds that haven’t really faced their own mortality yet highly skews the league.
Can COVID be transmitted via ass-slaps and head-butts? We need that data!
narrator: it can
What about chest bumps?
We’ll get Mark Sanchez and Gus Frerotte right on that!
>People are literally going to die because they had to ride splash mountain one last time.
The worst part is that people are literally going to die because SOMEONE ELSE had to ride Splash Mountain one last time. Very likely people like me, who are doing all the right things but inevitably will have to go out into the world occasionally and come into contact with those people.
I dunno about you, but I can’t WAIT until a physician or someone else the entire team interacts with gets it, and all of them have to quarantine. Does a group of just-signeds off the street compete in their place? Should that even count? What happens if TB12 gets shelved and Arians has to break out that no-name he’s got locked up in a bunker somewhere?
The *only* upside that I can think of to not having a football season is that Brady is going to throw a SERIOUS fit. Will probably involve deflating car tires and lots of phone destruction.
My vote is cancel the season, get out one of those old timey tin electric football games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYotwrZhWAE), then have the skill players for each team on a 2 hr zoom call smack talking while experts ‘play’ the game in the background. At the end of the year just give every team a virtual Super Bowl Trophy. Officially. That way every fan can have a smidgen of happiness despite the @&#$ that 2020 has been. They can just say, “Oh yea, we won the Super Bowl that year. I have no memory of anything but bleak misery from that, but wikipedia says it happened, so I must have watched it.”
As if Brady could contract the virus, all the avocados provide extra protection
Ha! I’m sure if the season is canceled he’ll eventually pivot to selling the TB12 cure. Too bad he didn’t live in the time of tuberculosis, cuz then he could copyright TB*3.
The spice.
As a Patriots fan, I’m okay with winning another Superbowl. Also, nice tb joke.
At this point in time it definitely feels like there shouldn’t be a season. While I feel the same way that basketball is starting up too soon, at least they and hockey are keeping everyone sequestered in 1/2 areas and there are a small fraction of the people involved. Football just requires too many people and too much close contact
One thing to keep in mind though is it’s not just the NFL and owners pushing for this. It’s the players and the NFLPA. The government would have to stop them.
I was supposed to go to Disney a few months ago. It was shutdown at the time, but they offered me a package to go on reopening. I passed. Not a chance of that happening. Not surprisingly, in a 24 hour period over the weekend, Florida added over 15k new cases. I live 10 minutes tops from the Florida stateline and the counties around me are experiencing huge positives increases. Almost every county within 50 miles of me (not a big radius I know) are experiencing a 20% positive rate. That’s high compared to what it was for us in the beginning. My wife was just tested and is in isolation. Trust me when I say this, it sucks.
That being said, I don’t believe any sport should be operating right now unless they are drastically reworked. No contact should be allowed for more than just a few brief moments at best. Maybe the NFL can be the N(F)FL – National (Flag) Football League – for at least this season. Either way, I’d say this comic basically sums up every sports attempt to still capitalize on the situation to make money. The players want to get paid. The owners want to get paid. The networks and the sponsors want to get paid.
The responses to that bobby hart tweet are gold
The Washington s is now official. The team has officially retired the nickname
Huh. I did not think the arrow brackets would delete the content between them, but I guess the page read them as code lol. It’s supposed to say Washington {redacted}s.
Just cancel the season at this point. Not like the panic is going to stop.
Eli should appreciate that his career ended when it did, especially with these.