Tuesday, June 2, 2020

2020 NFL Season in Jeopardy?

By Anthony Brancato

The "Jeopardy" answer is:

The winner of the 1994 World Series.

The correct question:

Who was nobody? Because of a strike, which ended the season on August 12, and also delayed the start of the 1995 season, and shortened it by 18 games per team.

The winner of the 2004-05 Stanley Cup.

Who was nobody? Because of the lockout that retroactively erased that entire season.

The winner of Super Bowl LV...

That has 33 potentially correct "Jeopardy" questions, not 32 — and it is not because the NFL has added an expansion team while none of us were paying attention.

One very plausible outcome of the 2020 NFL season is that it will be as unfinished as Schubert's Eighth Symphony — because there can obviously be no "social distancing," either on the field or in the locker room — and that will lead to all sorts of structural dilemmas for the league in 2021.

For example, how will the 2021 draft work? One possibility (as logical as any) is merely to add the 2020 records, such as they turn out to be, to the 2019 records to determine the 2021 draft order. The matchups of the 15th, 16th, and (presumably) 17th games (how the latter will be apportioned not even having been agreed upon yet) of the 2021 schedule (which since 2002 has used where each team had finished in their division the season before) will also have to be voted on — and wouldn't it have made far more sense for the owners to have voted on this, rather than worrying about Bill Belichick's cute little gamesmanship with the clock? And this has to be done before the NFL Record & Fact Book is published in early August.

And if even one player, coach, etc. dies of the virus?

In addition to all but certainly bringing the curtain down on the season, this will result in recriminations that will reverberate far beyond the football world, even the sports world — especially if it happens before November 3.

As much as so many of us love our football, is this really worth the risk?