Anyone who’s ever spent much time around the game of football knows the priority that football coaches put on preparation.
Game plans are the foundation upon which success and victory are built. Meticulously crafted based on any and all information available.
Heck, if you played football at even the lowest level you probably had a coach with a quippy quote about preparation. Maybe some variation of the famed six Ps.
Proper preparation (or prior planning) prevents piss-poor performance.
In a more high-brow academic presentation there is the philosophy Bill Belichick himself has referenced often over the years from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War that simply put, “Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.”
Somehow, though, it’s become quite evident over the last couple weeks that Commissioner Roger Goodell and the geniuses in power at the NFL really didn’t have much of a game plan for dealing with the coronavirus while trying to play a season in the midst of a global pandemic.
Nope, not even a game plan that a soon-to-be-fired coach might throw together on the fly for a short-week Thursday night football game.
Despite the benefit of having more time than any other sport in its return to play in a coronavirus-controlled world – and the ability to learn from the successes and failures of the NBA, NHL and, most importantly, their fellow non-bubble brethren of MLB – the NFL kick started its new season with a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach that is currently biting it in the ass beneath those very pants.
With proper preparation that was seemingly non-existent, the NFL’s performance in the face of an outbreak in Tennessee and an at this point still mini outbreak in New England has indeed been piss poor.
How is it possible that the NFL pushed the Patriots to board a plane last Monday to fly to Kansas City and battle the Chiefs in a rescheduled Monday night contest just two days after Cam Newton was placed on the team’s COVID-19 reserve list despite a well-documented incubation period for the virus?
Ignorance? Greed? Brazen disregard for medical advice? Stubborn adherence to a schedule and unwillingness to alter it?
Probably all of the above.
Less than five full weeks into the NFL season – moving toward a time when many scientists and experts have been projecting a second wave of the coronavirus and growing concerns about its spread as the weather changes and kids return to school, among other factors – the league’s COVID-19 game plan is worse than Belichick’s insistence on running the ball early and often in an ugly loss at Miami to close out the 2016 season.
Despite all the talk of increased practice squad spots, game-day call-ups, quarantine QBs, world-class testing and endless protocols, the NFL threw it all out the window to push forward with the Patriots game against the Chiefs.
Not surprisingly that led to three more Patriots going on the COVID-19 reserve list over the ensuing days, and yet the NFL’s initial response was to push New England’s game with Denver back a day and continue to play on. That was until those in Foxborough made it clear they’d lost all faith in the NFL’s protocols.
As Patriots captain Jason McCourty put it, players were left “trying to figure out who has our best interest in mind.”
While Belichick and the Patriots have clearly taken a serious even above-and-beyond approach in dealing with the coronavirus dangers – not something that can necessarily be said of Mike Vrabel and the Titans – faith in the league and union has deteriorated.
McCourty essentially articulated a vote of no-confidence in the NFL and the NFLPA.
“It is kind of a team thing. For us in this locker room, this is what we have,” McCourty said. “Between the players, the coaches, the administration, the staff, it is up to us to take care of one another, to make sure physically we are all set, make sure mentally because I think outside of here the people that don’t have to walk in our building — whether it is the league office, whether it is the NFLPA — they don’t care. We’re trying to get games played and we’re trying to get the season going. For them, it is not about our best interest, or our health and safety, it is about what can we make protocol-wise that sounds good, looks good and how can we go out there and play games.”
McCourty is right.
If the NFL did have a game plan for dealing with inevitable positive COVID-19 test results it was simple, as McCourty and other players have clearly come to understand.
“Play games.”
But what if the positive comes too close to the game based on the incubation period?
“Play games.”
Hell, the Titans didn’t get shut down completely until positive tests reached double-digits within the organization.
The NFL wanted us to believe it had put together the best return-to-play plan on the planet. Through its media mouthpieces came endless reports and speculation about flexible schedules, overlapping bye weeks, an ability to seamlessly add an extra week or two to the regular season and push back the Super Bowl.
Except none of it seems to have been true.
The NFL has avoided postponing games. Seemingly refuses to add an 18th week to the season or allow for the fact that maybe not all teams will play 16 games in 2020.
The NFL game plan for dealing with the coronavirus has crystalized before the eyes of fans, players and coaches alike in recent days.
“Play games.”
At almost all cost, reasonable precautions be damned.
The Patriots learned that in last week’s trip to Kansas City and because of it took a more proactive approach to protecting themselves this time around in regards to the Broncos game that the league reluctantly rescheduled after yet another positive test for next Sunday, in doing so affecting a half-dozen other teams.
Why?
“Play games.”
That’s apparently the NFL’s simple, ineffective game plan for navigating the coronavirus.
Time to scrap whatever’s left of the game plan before it’s too late and make some in-game adjustments before all is lost.
Because it’s one of the worst game plans the sport of football has ever seen.
