The NFL season is currently set to continue without interruption, although the COVID-19 pandemic may have some say in that before September rolls around and the NFL is ready to kickoff their 101st season. With this much notice ahead of the potential start to the season, the league has been reportedly hard at work to secure contingency plans and help the league go off with as little interruption as possible. And now, thanks to a report from John Ourand and Ben Fischer of the Sports Business Journal, we have some idea of what exactly that contingency plan might look like.
According to the report, one potential backup plan for the league’s schedule would involve a mid-October kickoff, a season that runs with no bye weeks and culminates with a late February Super Bowl — hardly the expanded schedule that NFL fans have come to know and love. But trying times call for compromise and should this be the biggest impact to the NFL in 2020, the league will have been spared the brunt of the impact — unlike Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association, all of which have seen their seasons thrown on ice and interrupted by lockdowns across the country.
Hopefully the current climate across the country will be able to stabilize and all will be able to return to something the more closely resembles “normalcy” — but the timetable for such a shift is still something that is hard to grasp. As such, the NFL is doing what it can to be ready whenever that time comes. With the NFL Draft having gone off without a hitch, the league is positioned to have another extended window before having to make any significant alterations.
Only time will provide the clarity needed to determine what those actions will be.
