For the moment, after players from New England and Kansas City tested positive for COVID-19, the NFL is postponing Sunday's Patriots-Chiefs game to Monday or Tuesday night.
But that could change, just as it did for the postponed Pittsburgh-Tennessee game.
Originally, after a cluster of Tennessee players tested positive, the league bumped Steelers-Titans to a weeknight game. It was later that the league instead postponed it for three weeks because there was a convenient spot in the schedule.
So it's entirely possible that Patriots-Chiefs could be rescheduled for later in the season.
There's also a good chance this isn't the last time a game will be disrupted by the virus.
The silver lining for the league is that this reshuffling is happening before teams have had their week off. If there are outbreaks later in the season, it will be much more complicated to reconfigure the schedule.
These situations also move the NFL one step closer to tacking an 18th week onto the regular-season schedule, one designated for make-up games.
It's easy enough to bump back the start of the playoffs by a week, and eliminate the week off between the championship games and the Super Bowl.
For that matter, moving the Super Bowl wouldn't be nearly as complicated as in a normal year, because there's no guarantee there would be spectators there, anyway. So blocking off sufficient hotel rooms in Tampa wouldn't be such an ordeal.
If a playoff-bound team were to complete its 16 games as currently scheduled, an 18th week would provide that team a week off before the postseason.
An extra week also would afford the NFL time to establish a bubble for the postseason and sequester the playoff teams.
This season, only the No. 1 seed in each conference is awarded a week off at the start of the playoffs, as opposed to prior years when the top two NFC and AFC teams got weeks off.
So if there were an 18th week, the No. 1 seeds would get two weeks off after the season _ providing they didn't have games to make up. What's more, if a No. 1 seed rested its starters in its 16th game, as some have in the past, those starters would have gone three weeks without playing a game, rekindling the rust-versus-rest dilemma.
Would the NFL tack on an 18th week if there were only a few make-up games that were inconsequential to the postseason picture? Probably not.
With so much swirling uncertainty, however, the NFL is keeping all options on the table.
