We all know about working at home. Heck, just about all of us have done it at some point --- if not the whole time --- since March when this COVID nonsense hit.
Can’t believe we are coming up on a year. Man.
Anyway, enough of looking back and being down about it.
Let’s talk about dealing with it.
Cleveland Browns coach Kevin Stefanski, who has done a marvelous job with his team and should be the league’s Coach of the Year, got hit with the virus. You know by now he can’t accompany his team to Pittsburgh for their Sunday night playoff game against the Steelers.
Know what else he can’t do? Work from home.
At least not in real-time while the game is going on.
That’s right, NFL rule prohibits Stefanski from communicating with his team electronically (or by any other means - smoke signals, passenger pigeon, etc.) for a window just before the game and all the way through the end. Long story short, the Browns sideline can’t have him watching on a television feed in his home and patch him in with a headset to the sideline and/or the booth.
To me, that’s a bit much.
It’s actually ridiculous considering we have the capabilities to do it. After all, the guy didn’t try to get COVID. He’d much rather be there with his squad and leading Cleveland in their first playoff game in, what is it, 126 years or whatever?
I can understand the NFL’s concerns and the league having an over-arching policy against this. They simply wouldn’t want off-site coaches being able to patch in and potentially use information or technologies from a remote location that could give them an advantage.
But I ask, in this case in particular, what would those be?
The Internet?
Stefanski having a real-time television feed at his house as opposed to being on the sideline when he doesn’t have one?
When he’s coaching on the sideline as normal, his assistants in the booth are privy to those things and can quickly relay information to him anyhow.
I’m just failing to see how a man burdened with COVID, wired in 135 miles away, would at all gain some advantage if he was permitted to have a hand in coaching the team he’s, well, the head coach of.
There are rare cases where exemptions should be made to rules. Just every so often there needs to be special dispensation given to things, especially because circumstances change that were never imagined when the rules were drawn up and then put into place.
This is one of them.
This whole COVID stuff is fluid.
The whole world --- the NFL included --- has changed variables and rules and certain ways of doing things midstream because of the unpredictability of this virus.
This is clearly one of those times.
Kevin Stefanski is the head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
He should be permitted to serve in that role Sunday evening.
