‘Remote’ describes NFL draft and chances for a normal season – OCRegister
The NFL draft will go on as scheduled this week, though in a “virtual” format to keep fans, team officials and new players from catching anything worse than football fever.
Commissioner Roger Goodell makes this year’s draft sound like a symbol for the league’s determination to stick to its 2020 calendar.
“As you can tell by the draft and by the start of the league year and by the (effort) to adjust to the environment we’re working in, we’re planning and working toward staying on schedule,” Goodell said in an interview with the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen.
The game schedule will be announced by May 9 for a regular season opening in September, Goodell told Eisen, “because that’s where we think we’ll be.”
Here’s another way of looking at the draft coming up Thursday-Saturday, April 23-25: Even more than usual, it’s a celebration of inflated expectations.
The fact is that while football is one sport that hasn’t had to call off any games yet, next season is already affected by the coronavirus pandemic — and the impact could get much worse.
Rams and Chargers games might be played at SoFi Stadium this fall, as always envisioned. There’s no way to predict. At least not unless your bookie posts an over-under line on when football is played.
But if you’re looking for a standard by which to judge the NFL’s pandemic response, how about this? Expect that the league will call the appropriate audibles even if that requires postponements or cancellations.
Pro sports are a reality-based community. They can draw on a history with serving as bellwethers of America’s recovery from crisis. The NFL learned a lesson once from coming back too soon, playing games two days after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Already, the pandemic forced the cancellations of the March and April “pro days” at which colleges show off draft-eligible talent for NFL scouts.
It closed team complexes, and prompted the Rams to close theirs even to players undergoing injury rehabilitation after center Brian Allen tested positive for the virus in late March. (Allen is reported to have recovered.)
It tore up the early-April opening of offseason workout programs for the five franchises that hired new head coaches, and the Monday, April 20 opening of the same programs for the rest.
And it means the draft won’t be the Las Vegas blowout the NFL planned but will be conducted remotely.
Goodell will emcee from his home in New York for the audience on ABC, ESPN and the NFL Network. Team general managers, coaches and other decision-makers will be linked electronically from their homes. Fifty-eight players expected to be picked in the early rounds will take part in the show using video and audio equipment sent to them by the league.
All of it figures to be a fascinating sign of the times. Which comes as a shock to those of us who thought we couldn’t get interested in an NFL draft if it were the last sports event on Earth. We never meant to test the proposition.
A season will be played, sometime and somehow.
For now all teams can do is try to prepare as if they’ll have a normal training camp starting in mid-July and a normal season starting in the second week in September. And all players can do to prepare is work out at home and imagine the possibilities. Like starting the season with games played in front of empty stands or strictly limited “crowds.”
For the Rams, the first activity anything like team workouts will be video-stream meetings starting Monday, April 27.
Who knows when teammates will be able to practice together again, or meet the kids they’ve brought into this crazy world via the draft?
The Rams have been holding press conferences for beat reporters with GM Les Snead, coach Sean McVay and veteran players via Zoom. It’s healthier and weirdly more human than the way we talk with them normally, jammed around their lockers or sitting at desks like college kids at a lecture.
The talk never strays far from COVID-19.
Quarterback Jared Goff doesn’t much like the idea of playing without fans, although that sounds like an option if even one of the 22 states with NFL stadiums is still forced to bar large gatherings by autumn.
“Not ideal. Not what you want to do,” Goff said, adding that “I understand there are a lot of bigger implications in play right now as far as the health of the world. If that’s what it is, we have to roll with it.”
But nose tackle Sebastian Joseph-Day looks at the bright side of the no-fans option.
“I don’t mind it. I love this game. I’m blessed to play it at this level. I’d honestly be grateful if we could play, because this thing is getting serious,” Joseph-Day said.
Wide receiver Cooper Kupp, meanwhile, finds himself thinking about when he was a kid and thought nothing of playing football with nobody watching.
“It’s kind of a nostalgic thought, that you can play a game like that at this level,” he said.
Until he finds out, he’s taking nothing for granted and eager to see how this will play (or not play) out.
“(I’m) trusting that things are going to come together. I don’t know how that’s going to be,” Kupp said. “There is the chance that things do start late, that this season could look very different from any football season that we’ve ever had.”
Teams will be on the clock later this week. Then they’ll wait and see about the calendar.
