The NFL Should Offer Players Another Opt-Out Window

Circumstances have changed since players were first given the chance to opt out, both on and off the field. It's only fair to give players the chance to hop off the ride now that they've seen what this season is really like.

If we’ve learned anything since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that any attempts at rigidity are ludicrous. The world is changing by the second, and applying hard-and-fast rules to life amid a pandemic without a complete behavioral analysis of the virus (or a safe, reliable vaccine) is like grasping at water.

So, as we woke up Wednesday to news that another Patriot, Stephon Gilmore—a player who was on the field for all 56 of the team’s defensive snaps on Monday, a player who was active in the mask-less postgame handshake ceremony, breathing directly into the helmets of other players (like Patrick Mahomes, who recently announced that his fiancée is pregnant)—has tested positive for the coronavirus, it’s time to rethink our approach to the remainder of the 2020 NFL season.

It seems the league has no interest in slowing down, even as the Titans’ outbreak continued with two more positive tests Wednesday and the team no closer to opening its facility. The fact that they played a Patriots–Chiefs game on Monday night, three days after New England’s quarterback tested positive for the disease, says it all about a sports entity that has callously blown through one stop sign after the next.

The only humane solution at this point is to give players a second chance to opt out. The league is clearly abdicating its responsibility to the players, so it’s time to give the players another chance to get off this ride before it’s too late. Now that they have a total picture of how it all works, realizing that a push for player safety runs parallel to a push for all games to get completed and all television revenue checks to be cashed before the ink dries, players can make a more informed decision about how they want to live their lives.

The rhetoric around the time of the opt-out deadline was that of a hermetically sealed NFL universe. Roger Goodell, in a letter to fans back in July, promised: “Every step of the way, our focus has been on the safety of players, coaches, personnel, fans and our communities.” When players initially signed up for the NFL season, they did so with a promise that they would be taken care of. It was hard to assume back then that protocols would be routinely violated. That personnel would openly flaunt the mask policy over the course of the first two weeks. That players would feel safe enough to return to some slices of normalcy, like the postgame handshake, assuming that they were only coming into contact with other healthy individuals.

It was notable at the time how many Patriots players opted out of the 2020 season to begin with. One can only imagine the group text chats they are having with the teammates who opted in, and how many of the guys in uniform Monday night now wish they could join them. Life changes. Circumstances change. Pregnancies, illnesses, engagements, deaths—all of them inform and alter our worldview. There's a good chance, like many of us, some NFL players are not the same people they were a few months ago.

Monday’s game, which was played well within the incubation window of the virus—meaning that there was no way to have a complete picture of the Patriots’ health situation—along with the subsequent positive test from Gilmore, flies in the face of the promises Goodell made. Shuttling a team across the country with a vague idea of how sick everyone might be is not the picture of a safe environment for personnel, fans or communities at large. Someone has to drive that team bus. Others have to clean the Patriots’ second airplane full of people (Gilmore included) who may have been infected but weren’t 100% sure. Others have to wash those players’ uniforms and polish their helmets.

A second player opt-out window could protect the league from the coldness of its true Full Steam Ahead mission statement, which should be considered a win-win at the highest levels. Unless, of course, the league is scared of more players hopping off the ship, talking about how grateful they are to be off the kind of rocky ride they weren’t expecting in the first place.