Even before last year’s NFL Draft, everyone knew the 2020 National Football League season was going to come with plenty of challenges, both for the league as a whole, and each individual team.
From a myriad of COVID-19 protocols and testing that changed and evolved as the season went on to social distancing and contact tracing, every team had to keep up with - and maintain - as safe and healthy of an environment as possible.
We’re now getting a glimpse into just how challenging some of that was for the Buffalo Bills, now that their season has ended.
Just one day after the team’s 38-24 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game, All-Pro cornerback Tre’Davious White, who had debated opting out of the 2020 season before it started, said he hadn’t seen his father since last May or June. On Tuesday, guard Jon Feliciano tweeted:
During their respective end-of-season Zoom conference calls with the media, I asked both head coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane to give more insight into some of the specific challenges they faced.
Here’s what each had to say:
Brandon Beane:
“It was stressful in the sense of not only during the week, but as you get closer to game day, once we got into the season. And that happened to us. We had a couple of instances on road games, we are emptying the building out on days we’re trying to leave and we’re doing contact tracing, and these guys are getting interviewed. ‘Was your mask on? How long was the interaction?’ And some of these were taking two and three-plus hours. I know when we flew into Arizona the first time, that was when Josh Norman tested positive, I was out on a scouting trip, but I was on the phone with the league. We had players at the airport ready to board the plane that we couldn’t let them board until we got clearance for everyone. I had to call players, and (head athletic trainer) Nate Breske as well, and say, ‘you’ve got to go home.’ Some of the close contacts. I think it was Levi Wallace, Dean Marlowe, and some guys. Tyler Kroft was in a car with them.
"It was a learning experience all along, and as the stakes were raised, the stress-level was raised. Hopefully Josh Allen doesn’t get it, hopefully [Stefon] Diggs. Any of these guys that really could impact what we do an offense or defense or whatever. You’re praying to the good Lord that the guys can avoid it.”
Sean McDermott:
“It’s real. From going to not knowing if we were going to have a season, if we could pull it off, all the work that went into getting training camp up and running on the front end, making sure we would be safe in this environment, especially not knowing back then what we didn’t know about the virus. Could we actually work together in the same room? As I am in the same room with [Vice President of Communications] Derek [Boyko] now. Simple questions like that. Things we took for granted before all of the sudden became challenges and tougher than expected, and so that then gets magnified over the course of the season. Every morning waking up, filling out a questionnaire, getting your nose swabbed, all of that is for good safety reasons, of course, but it becomes another layer on top of just trying to win games, and that’s hard enough in normal years. But we’re not unlike anybody else in the NFL, in terms of the challenges we have or had. I thought our players and staff did a phenomenal job of managing those challenges.
“And then realizing, waking up sometimes in the early morning to positive tests, that’s the other element as a head coach, as Nate Breske and Brandon and I all experienced, along with Kim and Terry [Pegula], that was another layer of, ‘how do we then handle that?’ Because you have to juggle schedules and at the end of the day come back to safety first. So, for football coaches evaluated on winning games sometimes that’s hard to keep a proper perspective and continue to keep priorities in proper order. All of that was a great challenge, but I think our organization, as we said at the outset, we knew that whoever had success this year would have an asterisk next to their name as an organization. And I mean that in a good way. We showed that we are a winning organization. We showed that we keep and maintain safety first, and we care about our people. That starts up top with Kim and Terry. And I think at the end of the day we won some games, and had a successful season on the field, albeit very disappointed in the game a couple of days ago.”
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