Because football is the only major sport that hasn’t been interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and the NFL has plowed through its offseason as usual, there seems to be an assumption that it’ll continue to do so.
That type of thinking led the league office to prepare a full, normal 16-game schedule for the 2020 season — an audacious move when all 32 facilities currently are closed indefinitely. The schedule comes out Thursday evening, about a month later than it typically has, though the NFL said it had been considering moving the highly anticipated annual release to May anyway.
It’s as though the league refuses to concede in any way that the outbreak might derail it.
Odds are, it will.
The conversation around coronavirus started with “weeks” before quickly shifting to months and now years. Illinois Gov. J.B Pritzker said Tuesday he can’t foresee gatherings of more than 50 people until the final phase of recovery, which won’t be this year. An NFL traveling party is triple that.
It’s fine to hope for the best, but the league needs to plan for something far less than that. A shortened season would undoubtedly result in some inequitable scheduling, so if the NFL were prudent, it would take that into account within the 16-game slate.
If football can’t start on time with a Thursday night opener Sept. 10, the league needs to establish priorities.
Every team’s six divisional games should be held the final six weeks of the season to give them the best chance of keeping those matchups intact. If it was only possible to play six games, those are the six games they need to play.
On the flip side, the cross-conference games should come first in the schedule. For the Bears, that means home games against the Texans and Colts, plus road games against the Jaguars and Titans.
That would deprive fans of some rare and compelling matchups throughout the league, but intra-conference games are more important in determining playoff spots. This will be the first season in which seven teams make the playoffs from each conference, by the way.
There’s been speculation about the league leaving open the possibility of taking the first four games of the season and tacking them on the back end of the schedule — meaning they’d be played throughout January — if needed, but that seems unlikely. Taking the regular season through the end of January and playing the playoffs in February would require the Super Bowl moving to March.
The Super Bowl is awarded 3-5 years in advance because of the massive amount of planning necessary to host it. It’s not so simple to just bump it back a month. There’s a far greater likelihood of the NFL canceling the first four weeks than delaying the Super Bowl.
One element that would maintain fairness is to have every team alternate home-road throughout the season, rather than have the occasional three-game homestand or back-to-back road games. That gives the NFL the best chance to have every team play the same number of home dates if it has to cancel games.
It’s rare to have this level of mystery going into an NFL schedule release, which has always been an odd holiday on the sports calendar. The Bears-centric drama is mostly about when the Green Bay games are and how many prime time slots they get.
It’s usually a little anticlimactic because the opponents are predetermined by the NFL scheduling model and have been known since December.
The Bears will play each team in the NFC North twice. They will also host the Saints, Giants, Buccaneers, Texans and Colts. They’ll travel to the Rams, Falcons, Titans, Jaguars and Panthers. That’s the plan, anyway.
But that’s not why everyone’s waiting for the schedule to drop. The NFL will become the first team sport in America with a plan to resume games. And that’ll be interesting, but it’ll also be hard to believe.
