B8 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020 SCORES ANALYSIS COMMENTARY
NYes, we need joyful distractions in
times of trouble. And yes, the N.F.L. has
long served that need more than any
other American sport.
But it’s not worth it at this cost.
Not with players,
coaches and staff across
the league getting in-
fected with the coronavi-
rus by the dozens.
Not as the virus spirals
out of control across the
country, causing Dr. Anthony Fauci to
predict that “December, January and
early February are going to be terribly
painful months.”
All sports are trying to plow through
this worsening stage of the pandemic,
arguing their economics are so dire that
there is no other option. College basket-
ball limps along, chasing the financial
windfall of March Madness. The N.B.A.
is planning to start another season this
month, and the N.H.L. is scheduled to
begin in January. Baseball remains
committed to opening next spring.
But football is different. It has far
larger teams and the games have never
been played in the kind of tightly con-
trolled “bubble” environments that
basketball and hockey used at the end
of last season to keep the outbreaks to a
minimum.
College football, as I’ve written, was
foolish to move forward knowing teams
would play in an environment that was
impossible to control. Its schedule is
full of games halted by the virus. Many
of its players — so-called amateurs who
help rake in millions for their schools
but don’t have the benefit of union
protection and labor laws — have had
positive tests.
Now, pro football, which helped set
the tone for a return to sports because
of its vast popularity, is an utter mess.
So much so that it is simply time for the
N.F.L. to press pause, regroup and
rethink its approach.
Of the league’s 30 teams, all but one,
the Seattle Seahawks, have been hit by
the virus. The outbreaks began piling
up almost from the start, as N.F.L.
teams began flying across the country
for games, some of them playing in
stadiums with a limited number of fans.
In October, two dozen Tennessee Titans
became infected, causing the first of
what has become a string of postpone-
ments.
The N.F.L. looks like it is running a
circus.
Among the latest lowlights: A
marquee game between the Baltimore
Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers,
scheduled for Thanksgiving Day, was
postponed to Sunday after positive
tests for several Ravens players, includ-
ing the league’s reigning most valuable
player, Lamar Jackson. As the number
of infected players began piling up, the
league moved the game to Tuesday.
Then the league rescheduled the
game again, this time for Wednesday
afternoon.
Why not play at night, giving players
who have barely practiced in recent
days more time to prepare, decreasing
their risk of injury? The scheduling
decision hinged on television, the
league’s cash cow. NBC, which will
broadcast the game, wanted to stick
with its plans to air the tree-lighting
ceremony at Rockefeller Center during
a two-hour prime-time special.
On the West Coast, the league didn’t
look any better. The San Francisco
49ers will play their next two home
games at the Arizona Cardinals’ sta-
dium, near Phoenix. That last-minute,
jury-rigged plan came about after offi-
cials in Santa Clara County, Calif.,
where the 49ers’ stadium is, wisely
decided to ban contact sports through
late December in a bid to stem the
virus surge wreaking havoc in large
parts of the state.
But there is a problem: State Farm
Stadium is in Maricopa County, which
has had an average daily infection rate
of 42.7 cases per 100,000 residents in
the past week — well above the alarm-
ing rate of 29.5 cases per 100,000 resi-
dents in Santa Clara County.
The change of venues only makessense for a league trying to keep a
troubled season going, not from the
standpoint of public health.
The league was making things up on
the fly, the same as it has done all sea-
son. “It seems like they didn’t have a
plan for what to do once people started
testing positive,” said Angela Ras-
mussen, a virologist at the Georgetown
Center for Global Health and Security,
when we spoke this week. “They’re sort
of flying by the seat of their pants,
trying to figure out how to actually
finish the season.”
Remaining on the current path is a
fool’s errand, added Eric Topol, a co-
ronavirus expert and professor of mo-
lecular medicine at Scripps Research.
Trying to play without the benefit of an
N.B.A.-style restricted environment, he
said “is an exercise not just in futility,
but in danger.”
Agreed.
It would be better to pause the sea-
son now, retool the health protocols and
wait out the coming storm. If the virus
recedes to controllable levels by the
early part of 2021, resume with a short-
ened playoff and a Super Bowl — ditch-
ing the current plan to allow fans in thestands at that game.
An even wiser option: End the sea-
son now.
Fans won’t like it. Players and
coaches will balk. A league with teams
worth billions of dollars will talk about
how it can’t afford to miss out on the
television revenue. But it has come to
this: For the sake of us all, stop play.
Prepare instead for a return in the fall
of 2021, when a vaccine has a chance to
help life return to something close to
normal.
Why not?
Are N.F.L. games essential? Hardly.
Are teams based in communities
brimming with infection? Indeed.
Do virus-infected players and staff
members, even the ones who look and
feel fine, add fuel to the fire in each of
those communities? You bet.
It is possible to love the N.F.L. and
stand against the arguments for con-
tinuing the patchwork approach her-
alded by football enablers fixated on
profits.
For too long, they’ve normalized the
threat.
The persistent risks of the virus —including possible damage to the heart
and other internal organs — are rarely
discussed. Positive test results get
discussed as if Covid-19, the disease
caused by the virus, is akin to a
sprained ankle for young athletes.
In a September column, as the sea-
son got underway, I posed hard ques-
tions. Is the return of our country’s
most popular sport sending a false alert
that we have almost conquered the
virus? Is the N.F.L. joining in the
deadly and premature message that
we’re back, we can do what we want
and the ordinary days of old are just
around the bend?
It’s well worth thinking hard about
such questions once again.
The death toll stood at 193,700 when I
wrote that column. Think of that. All the
grandparents, mothers, fathers, chil-
dren, neighbors. Two months later,
roughly 77,000 more have perished.
That’s the equivalent of everyone at a
packed Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas
City, gone.
It is time to rethink our whole ap-
proach to this scourge. The N.F.L.
would be an excellent place to start.Does America Really Need Football This Badly?
A fan wearing a face mask and football helmet sat amid the cutouts at a Baltimore Ravens game on Nov. 1. Only one N.F.L. team has avoided coronavirus cases.PATRICK SMITH/GETTY IMAGESKURT
STREETER
SPORTS OF
THE TIMESIf the N.F.L. schedules a game for a
Wednesday, it is a safe bet that some-
thing went wrong. From a presidential
speech to Pennsylvania’s restrictive
blue laws to a velodrome flooded with
mud, the league tends to move its con-
tests to that day of the week only as a
last resort.
That is certainly the case for Wednes-
day’s game between the Baltimore
Ravens and the undefeated Pittsburgh
Steelers, which was originally sched-
uled for a prime-time spot on Thanks-
giving. The game was later moved to
Sunday afternoon because of a corona-
virus outbreak among the Ravens, then
pushed to Tuesday night when the
outbreak spread to affect more than 20
people, and finally ended up on
Wednesday.
A look back at Wednesday games
throughout N.F.L. history reveals the
league may not play on the day very
often, but Wednesdays have provided
more than their fair share of indelible
memories.
2012: Giants Eat Humble Pie
With President Barack Obama sched-
uled to speak on the Thursday of the
Democratic National Convention in
2012, the N.F.L.’s traditional season
opener was moved one day earlier. The
defending-champion Giants hosted
Tony Romo and the Dallas Cowboys
and promptly had much of the enthusi-
asm for the previous season’s triumph
fade away with a 24-17 loss to their
division rivals.
“It takes a bite out of humble pie,”
Coach Tom Coughlin said of the loss.
The humbling continued as the Gi-
ants went 9-7 that season and missed
the playoffs, though they did manage
the somewhat unusual distinction of
playing on four different days of the
week that year. In addition to their 13
Sunday games, the Giants played
games on a Monday, a Wednesday and
a Thursday.1948: Oh, Those HelmetsAs part of a spread-out start to the
1948 season, the Los Angeles Rams
played the Detroit Lions on Sept. 22. It
was the league’s first Wednesday game
since 1940, when it was a more common
occurrence, and its last one until 2012.
Far more significant than the day of
the week was a uniform innovation that
came courtesy of Los Angeles halfback
Fred Gehrke. Thanks to Gehrke, who
had been an art major in college, the
Rams became the first N.F.L. team to
play a regular-season game with logos
on their helmets.
Gehrke hated the plain brown leather
helmets of the era, so he painted one
blue and added the team’s now-familiaryellow horns. The Rams’ owner, Dan
Reeves, liked the design, and Gehrke
spent the summer decorating 75 hel-
mets for use in the 1948 season, col-
lecting a $1 fee for each helmet he
painted.
Gehrke would eventually become
general manager of the Denver Bron-
cos, but he was well aware of where he
made his mark.
“I spent the better part of my life in
football, and I’ll be best remembered
for some work I did with a paintbrush,
but that’s OK,” Gehrke told Sports
Illustrated in 1994. “I’ve been called the
da Vinci of football helmets, and that’s
not all bad.”1929: The First Night GameHelmet design is not the only football
innovation to make its debut on a
Wednesday, as the N.F.L. also played itsfirst night game on a Wednesday, way
back in 1929.
In the early days of the league, the
Providence Steam Roller played their
home games at the Cycledrome, a bicy-
cle racing stadium in Rhode Island. A
game against the Chicago Cardinals
was unplayable because of heavy rains,
but in a chaotic financial environment
brought about by the recent stock mar-
ket crash, the team’s players were
unwilling to skip a week of pay. So the
Steam Roller brass arranged a makeup
game for Wednesday, Nov. 6, at Kinsley
Park, a minor-league baseball stadium
that had recently installed lights.
The Providence Journal recorded a
crowd of 6,000 for the game in which
the ball was painted white, giving it
“the appearance of a large egg” in
hopes that players would see it better.
The matchup, part of a stretch of four
games in six days for Providence, re-sulted in a 16-0 loss for the Steam
Roller, but it was a financial success.
Seeing that the future would include
more night games, the financially
struggling Steam Roller were not done
innovating. At least one Providence
player, Tony Latone, had a clause writ-
ten into his 1930 contract that called for
him to receive only 60 percent of his
regular pay for night games. According
to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the
team claimed the savings would go
toward light maintenance.1933-36: Pittsburgh’s TimeWhile Wednesdays are an unusual
day for an N.F.L. game, they are some-
what familiar territory for the Steelers,
or at least they were in the early days
of the franchise.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, as the team
was originally known, began play in- Because of the restrictive blue
laws in Pennsylvania, they were not
initially allowed to play home games on
Sundays. As a result, the first four
games in Steelers history were played
on Wednesdays.
Heavy political lobbying — largely
intended to lift a financial burden on the
far more popular baseball teams of the
state — had the rules eased consider-
ably, opening the door for Sunday foot-
ball. But Pittsburgh did not abandon
Wednesdays entirely, with the team
appearing in 10 of the N.F.L.’s 13
Wednesday games from 1933 to 1936,
going 4-6.
Despite that extended run of
Wednesday play, the Steelers do not
hold the record for games played on
Wednesdays. The Detroit Lions, who
are somewhat synonymous with play-
ing on Thanksgiving, also hold the
record for Wednesday games, playing
in 13 of them from 1930 to 1948, first as
the Portsmouth Spartans and later
under their current name.
An N.F.L. Game on a Wednesday Isn’t as Weird as It Seems
By BENJAMIN HOFFMANIn 1948, the Los Angeles Rams, above left, became the first N.F.L. team to use logos on their helmets. Above right, the
Pittsburgh Pirates, as they were called in the 1930s, often played on Wednesdays because of Pennsylvania’s blue laws.COURTESY OF THE PRO FOOTBALL HALL OF FAMEKEEPING SCOREASSOCIATED PRESS