The NFL is too big to be stopped by coronavirus

New York Magazine

The recent COVID outbreak on the Baltimore Ravens and the Denver Broncos losing all their quarterbacks weren't enough for the NFL to cancel its first game of the season and tack on an additional week. Instead, the NFL is rescheduling games around the coronavirus. "The NFL has long sold itself as the inflexible monolith of American sports, an impenetrable fortress that bends for no one," says Will Leitch. "But you’ve seen how well supposed impenetrable fortresses have been holding up in 2020. The NFL, like the rest of us, is in the midst of a COVID-19 crisis. And — perhaps most mortifying to a league long accused of putting positive public relations above player safety and societal good — it’s playing out for the whole world to see" Leitch adds: "While the NFL holds the disadvantage of trying to finish its season in the middle of the worst COVID-19 surge yet, it also holds the advantage of being the sport that <i>started its season last. And it has absorbed a few lessons that other leagues had to learn the hard way. The most important being: <i>Don’t stop your season. Actually, the most important lesson is 'play in a bubble,' but going the way of the NBA was never a realistic notion for the NFL, with its army of personnel. So, in lieu of that, the NFL has taken a page from MLB and, especially, college sports (particularly those in the South) and decided that the only way to survive a pandemic is to plow right through it — and to stop for nothing."

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