Photo by Eric Deeran on Unsplash
As Ohio turns purple—the scariest color on the COVID-19 pandemic barometer—the Cleveland Browns once again have had to shut down their Berea facility, only to quickly move beyond the immediate threat and reopen for the business of football.
And what a strange business it has become.
The team might as well install a revolving door entrance/exit at its headquarters on Lou Groza Drive. Personnel have been coming and going with head-spinning frequency, sometimes on the same day. It is as if they scheduled practice and a tennis match broke out. If spectators or even media were allowed to watch, it would be as if they were following a fuzzy little ball from one side of the net to the other. It does not make for riveting television but is good neck exercise.
The Browns, of course, are not the only National Football League team playing this game and hardly the worst at it. I wrote a previous post you can find here about what the coronavirus has done to the game, but at the time it seemed as if the greatest threat was to college football and that the NFL, with its more controlled environment, was maneuvering successfully through the maze of this Season of Our Ambivalence. We want the game to go on, but we realize it can be dangerous to continue to play.
In the past week the situation has roared through ridiculous and into sublime. It took Pittsburgh and Baltimore, the Browns chief rivals, almost a week and three postponements to play their matchup scheduled for Thanksgiving primetime. In the process, it became a novelty. Forget Monday night, Sunday night, and Thursday night football. COVID-19 brought us late-afternoon Wednesday football. The game was delayed longer than presidential loser Donald J. Trump’s concession speech. OK, that’s an exaggeration. Trump may never concede.
He has had a bout with COVID-19, if his diagnosis wasn’t fake news. The virus would give him something in common with the Ravens who used to be the Browns but now reside in a city that Trump hates and considers rat infested. (He pretty much hates all cities, especially the ones run by Democrats, which are many of the good, big ones.) I do not know about rats but the Ravens have been infested with the virus, including quarterback Lamar Jackson for whom briefly Brown Robert Griffin III had to fill in.
Jackson, 2019 NFL Most Valuable Player, is hardly the only quarterback to be affected by COVID-19. The Browns’ Baker Mayfield missed an important chunk of practice time because he came into contact with someone in the organization who had tested positive. The Denver Broncos quarterback room leads the league in COVID issues. When Jeff Driskel tested positive, the team had to call up a practice-squad wide receiver to play quarterback. The rest of the quarterbacks had to stand down because everyone in that room had violated the NFL protocol that requires masks in such places.
The Denver quarterback room resembled nothing if not the one in which the Trump cabinet meets. Since the beginning of this pandemic, Trump has eschewed wearing a mask, and many of his minions have followed suit, gleefully it has seemed. Trump has led them down the Path of Untruths by the Lake of Lying Waters in which they seemed to have soaked their heads. Like the president himself, they have provided terrible examples for us Americans they are supposed to have been leading. They probably thought they didn’t need no stinking masks.
Trump cabinet members were invincible, not unlike the president who could not lose. They did not require PPE (Personal Protective Equipment, which Trump failed to provide in sufficient quantity to medical personnel), because they had PPP—Puffed-up Prophylactic Pomposity—to keep them safe from harm. It may have made them look like Pillsbury Doughboys—not many girls in the Trump cabinet—because they already had a head start in this direction. Trump provided a blubbery, blubbering example.
The question at hand is whether NFL leaders will be more responsible than the man who spent his presidency attacking NFL players and those for whom they worked and whom he blamed for not taking away their rights to free speech and actions, specifically kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and injustice).
The NFL has done a thoughtful job of putting together a season, though it is the least enjoyable of my lifetime because of the risk required to play. In the past week the commentariat has turned, in increasing numbers, to call for a pause if not an end to the season. It is an awkward position. While the game that can never be inherently safe has been made safer and more concern given to head injuries, it can still feel as if all us who care about football have turned into hypocrites because our heads are not in those helmets. Once, they were, and we would play until someone told us we couldn’t.
I’m not ready to try to tell those who have been good enough to continue in the game that they should not. I have, however, become increasingly uneasy about this season and the risk that might be lessened by rethinking where we have come to and where we should go. When Santa Clara County, home of the San Francisco 49ers and some of the most stringent coronavirus policies in the NFL, declared contact sports could not be played, the 49ers became an itinerate team. They will play in the Arizona Cardinals’ State Farm Stadium, where no such prohibition exists, even though the virus has raged.
This may be the United States of America but there is no unity among states with NFL teams when it comes to rules regarding the coronavirus. Just as the country is divided politically so too is it divided when it comes to its football. Thus the Browns will travel to Tennessee to meet the Titans in this terrible time, and Browns fans will cheer from afar and few will ask if the desire to see this successful season completed is worth the price.
