It has gone down as one of the worst performances by a player in recent NFL history – through little fault of his own.
Last weekend, 23-year-old Kendall Hinton, a practice squad wide receiver who had never before played professional football, ran on to the field as quarterback for the Denver Broncos, with just four hours’ notice and only his college-playing experience to rely upon. The deployment was described as unprecedented in the modern game.
That the Broncos, one of the league’s most-lauded teams, lost 31-3 to the New Orleans Saints, came as little surprise as commentators shook their heads at the inevitable. “Imagine air traffic control trying to talk a passenger through landing a 747. Now you understand the nightmare of the Denver Broncos,” Sam Farmer wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Hinton’s impromptu appearance was triggered by all four of the Broncos’ quarterbacks being ruled out after one of them – Jeff Driskel – tested positive for Covid-19. The remaining three were ordered to isolate after failing to wear masks around Driskel at the team’s practice facility, against NFL rules.
The Broncos chaos was far from an isolated incident for the NFL this season. As Covid-19 cases surge across the US and the death toll approaches 280,000, “America’s game” has struggled withcoronavirus just as badly as the country it claims to represent. The NFL’s troubles have become, some say, an expensive and high-profile microcosm of the wider antagonism in the US over the virus, pitting the desire to continue with business as usual against warnings from health officials about the high level of risk posed by close-contact sports.
Other examples abound. One of the most anticipated games of the season, between the Baltimore Ravens and their fierce rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, had been scheduled for a primetime slot on Thanksgiving. Instead it had to be rescheduled three times after more than a dozen Ravens players – including one of the league’s biggest stars, the quarterback Lamar Jackson – tested positive for the virus. The game eventually took place in a distinctly “unprimetime” slot on Wednesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, the San Francisco 49ers will play their next two home games in Arizona, 700 miles from their usual stadium, after Santa Clara county, where the team is based, issued a temporary ban on contact sports as cases surge in California. Such has been the spread of the virus across the US – and the NFL – that the Seattle Seahawks are the only one of the league’s 32 teams not to have recorded a positive test for Covid-19.
While the federal government has failed to mount an effective or coherent response to the pandemic, the NFL says it is taking appropriate measures. It has issued heavy fines to teams who have failed to wear masks, while players and coaches are tested daily.
But others insist the NFL’s response is a reflection of the chaotic handling of the pandemic in the country as a whole. There were 86 positive tests among NFL players and staff in the week ending 28 November, compared with seven in the first week of the season, at the start of September.
“It seems like they didn’t have a plan for what to do once people started testing positive,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown Center for Global Health and Security, told the New York Times this week. “They’re sort of flying by the seat of their pants, trying to figure out how to actually finish the season.”
It is little surprise the NFL – like much of the US – is pushing back against restrictions. Broadcasting rights, worth billions of dollars, are due for renewal in 2022 and a half-completed season could hurt the league at the negotiating table. A cancelled or delayed Super Bowl would also be a problem for its broadcast partners: in 2019, networks charged an average of $5.25m (£3.9m) for a 30-second advert slot during the game.
The NBA, which is seen as a better organised, more forward-thinking league than the NFL, completed its season by playing in an isolated “bubble” at Disney World in Florida. That would be more difficult to achieve in the NFL, whose teams carry much larger rosters. There have been calls for the league to halt the season while it figures out its next steps with Covid-19 cases predicted to rise in the coming weeks, but that is unlikely to happen.
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“It’s not being considered,” an NFL spokesman told the Guardian. “We are focused on concluding the 256 regular-season games within our 17 week-schedule followed by the playoffs culminating with fans in the stands in Tampa on 7 February for the Super Bowl. We have been successful in this unprecedented year and are on the path to completing the season as scheduled.
“We have also been flexible and adaptable and have approval on playing games in an 18th week in the event we need to. But there’s no reason to believe at this point that we would need to change our plans.”
If there has been any relief, it came in the college game, which is more popular than the NFL in many parts of the US. In a rare – and welcome – uplifting moment, Sarah Fuller became one of the first women to play at the top level of men’s college football after several members of the Vanderbilt Commodores were ruled out owing to Covid-19. Like Hinton, Fuller was a relative novice: until last week she was a goalkeeper for the university’s soccer team.
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