President believes NFL season will start on time

President Donald Trump held a conference call with major-league sports commissioners on Saturday and reportedly stated that he believes the NFL season should begin in September as scheduled. The President also hopes to have fans in the stadiums by August and September when games will begin.

Football season is still currently five months away so it is impossible to know what things will look like at that time. I guess it’s possible that we could be ready to carry on with professional sports at that time but I just don’t see how.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge football fan. It’s my number one sport and I would love for it to happen this year as much as anyone. 

But I just don’t see how you can have the season proceed based on what we know so far.

First, we know that a vaccine will not be readily available until early next year, at the earliest.

Yes, treatment will be around but those will not prevent people from getting the disease — they will just help with the symptoms.

It’s very likely that the coronavirus will be under control by sometime in June and by the time the summer ends, the odds of contracting the disease will be greatly diminished due to social distancing measures and (hopefully) advanced testing and tracing that should be in place at that time.

But everyone will still run the risk of contracting the disease until a vaccine is available because the asymptomatic rates are so high.

It takes a lot of people to run a football program. Beyond the athletes, you have coaches, staff members, trainers, managers, stadium personnel, media members, and the list just goes on and on.

Many of these people come into contact with each other on a frequent basis so there will be a high risk of transmitting within organizations.

And unless you quarantine entire organizations, they are going to continue to live their lives and go out in public and mingle with others.

So unless you were to continually test all of the athletes and other personnel involved with the teams, you would not be able to filter out individuals carrying the virus.

And even if you did test athletes and personnel like crazy — let’s say every week.

As soon as a couple of athletes within an organization test positive, there will be a mad dash to trace their contacts and in many cases they will likely have had many contacts within the club.

So either an outbreak will already be in the works within a team or a potentially wide scale quarantine will have to happen for a couple of weeks to prevent a future outbreak.

Either situation would make getting through a 16 game schedule very tough or even impossible.

And the first time that someone passes away, especially if it’s a high-profile athlete, there’s going to be massive blow back.

And that is not even considering the issue of having tens of thousands of fans congregate for tailgates and for games….

So I appreciate having an optimistic view on things but from a realistic perspective, I just don’t see how sports can go on until we have virtually eradicated the virus.

And most models I’ve seen show us having the virus highly contained by August but definitely not eradicated.

So I would not get my hopes up and would align my expectations more with other football experts who don’t believe that football will take place this fall.

With all this said, I really, really hope I’m wrong but I think we just need to start preparing ourselves to accept the reality that we may not have sports for the time being.

H/T: ESPN