The Pandemic Season is Already Broken

By the time the season is over, none of it will matter.

COVID-19 has already impacted the Kansas City Chiefs directly, between Jordan Ta'amu testing positive and Stephon Gilmore's confirmed case one day after playing the Chiefs and supplying us with the now-uncomfortable image of he and Patrick Mahomes hugging after the game. Then, of course, we've got basically everyone associated with the Tennessee Titans testing positive.

It’s starting to feel inevitable that the NFL season is going to have to hit pause and recalibrate itself if the league wants to finish the season. Alternatively, we’re going to end up with a season filled with postponements, forfeitures, and mini-outbreaks across the league.

The NBA had the luxury of a bubble. MLB didn’t have that luxury until their playoffs. Luckily for baseball, though, teams play like a million games a year and if they have to postpone some, they can just make them up by playing double-headers.

The NFL is loosely-regulated hyper-violence whose teams only play 16 times a season. If you had an NFL double-header, I’m pretty sure half the players would die. I’m even cringing at the idea that the Chiefs might have to play three games in ten days if their upcoming Thursday Night Football matchup with the Buffalo Bills remains in its spot on the schedule.

Football is too big to have done a single bubble, and the logistics of multiple smaller bubbles would've still been near-impossible to pull off in a way the NFL would have tolerated. I mean, what do you expect the NFL to have done? Spent some of their infinite money to prioritize player safety and build multi-field facilities that would’ve allowed them to bubble-off teams into divisions that only played each other to determine playoff seeding?

Instead, we’ve got a season only one-quarter completed and already feeling like it's on the precipice of complete disaster.

After Cam Newton’s positive test, not a single Patriot tested positive all the way through their Monday game against the Chiefs. It was only the following day that Stephon Gilmore was a confirmed case. So, it’s perfectly conceivable that not only more Patriots will test positive in the coming days, but many Chiefs could, too.

That air of complete mystery does further harden my feelings that playing this season isn’t ultimately worth it. But I’m also a total addict who has conditioned myself to need football, so despite my moral oppositions, I’m still going to happily consume the product. There’s just always going to be the voice in the back of my head that knows the best way to assure the NFL’s future is to pause or cancel this season.

Neither of those are going to happen, probably. Barring an outbreak that consumes the whole league, the NFL is going to press on through a pandemic as if it’s some mountain to climb and conquer. At the bare minimum, they should push the Super Bowl into the spring and allow for January to be an empty month saved aside for making up postponed games. I don’t necessarily trust the NFL to do something like that, either.

Chiefs fans need to be prepared for the potential of the loss column being filled with forfeitures. Any success of any team this year will be met with a universally-understood asterisk.

Just the image of the Patriots traveling on separate planes, one filled only with those who were in close contact with Cam Newton, is ludicrous enough. It was one of those “What are we doing?” moments that are so often created when a company’s greed and people’s thoughtless consumption intersect.

Right now, football feels necessary. It feels like some small sense of normalcy in the constant bedlam. But when you pull the camera back from the action you see empty seats, piped in crowd noise, and reporters talking to players from the stands. Sports in 2020 isn’t normalcy, it’s just as much part of that bedlam.

So now you’re at the end of this, and all these words have just been different ways of me saying “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do here.” I just know we aren’t doing it correctly. We’ve consistently made a big mess bigger when we’ve tried to clean it up. Then there are those deliberately trying to make the mess bigger out of some cynical “if it’s all a mess, then none of it is” mindset.

The NFL is doing nothing but banging its head against the wall, trying to function as “normal” as possible. It’s destined failure that ends with either a lost season and a bunch of sick players and coaches or an asterisk season that holds no weight in the future.

And yet, despite all that, I’ll continue to live-tweet every Chiefs game and religiously follow their #RunItBack tour. It’s a lazy ignoring of reality and moral hypocrisy, but I'll be damned if I’m not going to hang another Super Bowl poster at the end of this season.