Getty Image
It’s the most unprecedented NFL season known to man, with the league struggling to fit games in each week while being forced to adapt on the fly. It may be working at the moment, but treading water for the rest of the year doesn’t seem sustainable — especially since this pandemic doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon.
As we all monitor how teams are impacted by COVID-19 each and every week, there’s no real plan in place by the league about what might happen if a major outbreak occurs. While nobody wants to even think about that, we’re getting into the time of year when flu season hits hardest, and nobody knows for sure what that means for the coronavirus. Teams like the Tennessee Titans and Denver Broncos have already been forced to reschedule games following minor scares, but what happens if a handful of teams (or more) need to push games a week or two? How that’d impact the NFL season is completely unknown — and here’s to hoping we don’t need to ever find out.
Given the league monitoring things hour-by-hour given the amount of tests and results for players, coaches and staff, there’s a new report that says playing Super Bowl 55 in March is a real possibility. That’s coming from a recent article published in Sports Business Daily, which talked to Packers CEO Mark Murphy about the possible contingency plan for the league schedule.
Per Pro Football Talk:
“We could move the Super Bowl back as far as four weeks,” Murphy said during a virtual pep rally prior to the game against the Buccaneers. “Obviously, we’d prefer not to do that, but you do have that flexibility if we run into a number of outbreaks with different teams or if we have to kind of move the schedule back.”
That’s still a last resort. Indeed, the league is still resisting as long as possible tacking an eighteenth week onto the regular season.
“We’d prefer not to [add a week], we’d like to play as much as possible [with] the schedule as it sits now,” Murphy said, explaining that the cancellation of the Pro Bowl makes it easy to push everything back a week and keep the Super Bowl in its current spot: Sunday, February 7.
You’ve got to admire the ambition the NFL has in completing its schedule as planned and try to make this wild, wacky, anything-but-normal NFL season as routine as possible. Adding a week (or more) to the schedule isn’t ideal — and could present a logistical nightmare — but if it keeps everybody safe, so be it. Players, coaches and team owners knew all the challenges this year was going to bring, and the possibility of moving the Super Bowl to a later date has been something discussed since earlier this year.
Now, if Super Bowl 55 is to be played in March, that’d almost be worst-case scenario, and would mean the league needed an additional 4-5 weeks in order to complete the season. It’d mean outbreaks occurred at alarming rates. It’d mean things got so out of control with COVID-19 that we’d be worse than when this all started. So let’s all hope the NFL season — which is already incredibly weird — doesn’t have to adapt and make these drastic changes, and that everyone stays healthy and safe.