Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has painted a bleak outlook for the prospects of NFL fans in stadiums for a preseason contest.
DeWine spoke on the topic of the annual preseason game — this year between the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers — this week, per ESPN’s Brooke Pryor:
“As much as I hate to say this, because we’ve all been looking forward to that and I know how much it means to the Canton area and the Stark County area and, really, across the country, it’s a great, great event that we’ve been looking forward to, [but] having a crowd that size is highly unlikely. Certainly, it could not occur today. It would be very dangerous to do it today.
Again, we have to see where we are at that point, but that’s a large crowd, a lot of people together. These are the things that we’ve talked about all the way through this as we open Ohio up and we get back to work and we get back to doing the things that we like, probably the last things that are going to be able to be open are the big crowds, particularly when you have big crowds that are close together. So we have to continue to look at it and make decisions as we move forward, but if the question was, ‘could that even occur today?’ the answer would be, ‘no.'”
While the comments don’t necessarily have a big impact on what happens with fan attendance during the regular season, it could be a sign of things to come over the summer for training camps and other games on the preseason schedule.
This comes as the NBA, for example, is working out the framework to resume an altered form of play in Florida.
In the interim, the Bengals continue their all-virtual meetings program.
