Covid won’t prevent NFL season, with football players plentiful

LLANO, Texas — The NFL season is a month from starting, and I’m coming around to the position that it will start on time: Houston at Kansas City, Thursday, September 10.  It won’t be anything like it was.  The league will be missing 67 players who opted out to avoid coronavirus.  To the extent that it can be avoided.

There won’t be fans in the stands, although some NFL owners retain hope that by midseason the stadiums can be at least one-third full with staggered socially distanced seating.  I see that happening in states governed by the science-deniers, such as Georgia, Florida, Arizona and my own moderately enlightened Texas, where alcohol is an essential business and so is football. 

I realize that of all team sports, football creates the most exposure to the pandemic.  But some trends point to it succeeding this fall, at least on the pro level.

• The curve is flattening ever so slightly, New York endangered more by hurricanes than viruses.
• Americans, from billionaire owners to lowest-salaried special teamers, see their bank accounts shrinking.
• If there’s one thing America has lots of, it’s football players.  Even if half the NFL players test positive, the work force can be quickly replenished.  Taxi squads are lining up.

The NFL has to worry only about quarterbacks.  The reason they get paid so much more than all other players is that they’re the stars the fans want to see.  Everyone else is an accessory.

If, heaven forbid, Patrick Mahomes, Russell Wilson, Deshaun Watson, Lamar Jackson, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Kyler Murray, Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Wentz and Matt Ryan contract COVID-19 – or even half of them do – then the sport sinks like the Titanic.

But isn’t it possible to protect quarterbacks from infection?  Their position, unlike most others, does not entail people breathing on them.  That became a 15-yard penalty two years ago.

So back to Point No. 1, the curve flattening.  As baseball was about to launch, I calculated that about 50 big-league players would contract the virus during the two months of the so-called regular season.  The law of probability suggested 0.8 of them would die.  I was worried because that means more than a 50-50 chance at least one of them perishes.

Turns out I was overly optimistic about the infection rate.  Two teams, Miami and St. Louis, already have combined for half my projected total, and we’re just a quarter of the way through the 60-game season.  Looks like there will be more than 50 casualties.

But the good news is the U.S. leads the world in corona recovery, as the scientist-in-chief is fond of tweeting.  

The mortality rate is less than it was, thanks to improving chemistry — drugs that work better than the debunked hydroxy that Dr. Trump is tirelessly pushing.  So I’m seeing hope that given the youth and physical fitness of most professional athletes, none of them have to die.

If only this country could match the rest of the modern world in virus-testing.  We have the planet’s highest per capita death rate from Covid because it takes us longer than any country but Brazil to figure out who’s ill.  Pardon me if this is racist, but I think it’s bad to be dumber than Brazil.

Bill Gates, richest man in the world and presumably smarter than most, said on Fareed Zakaria GPS: “You can’t get the federal government to improve the testing, because they just want to say how great it is.  I’ve told them, ‘Don’t reimburse any test that can’t give you a result for three days.  You’re paying billions of dollars to get the most worthless test results of any country in the world.  You pay as much for the late result as for the timely result.  

“No other country has this testing insanity.’”

But Gates also pointed out: “We have tests that can be self-administered with a swab just to the tip of the nose.  Very wealthy people have access to these quick-turnaround tests.”  

The President has access to the fast test.  My guess is he will make sure the NFL, which also can afford it, has the best of American testing.  At least until too many players kneel while the national anthem is playing.  

It’s disappointing that the NFL hasn’t got its protocols together; players aren’t sure of the specifics.  But I suppose that’s part of the game.  The main part.  Teams that do the best job of corona control are the ones we’ll see in the playoffs.

We can lament what might have been.  As states reopened, scientists were begging for just five more weeks.  Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control, said on Fareed: “In this country we didn’t stay shut long enough.  We’re paying the price for that.  In the past week people in Europe had one-eighth the risk of being killed by Covid as people in the United States.”

But we will have pro football and they won’t.  Even if we have no idea who will show up on Sunday and who most of them are that do show up.  I will be watching.  I won’t be betting.  Or predicting.  Enough of that.