There are only so many ways to try to pull off a football season in a country that’s being overrun with a pandemic. The NFL attempted zero of those. This was not just because the few options available are difficult and annoying and require massive compromises and collective action, although that surely didn’t make them more appealing. It’s because the very act of doing that work would be an admission of vulnerability; the facile conceit that makes football work is that the people who play and coach are
just different, and both less human and somehow superhuman for it. Every other American sports league has had to warp and wrench itself out of order just to have some kind of season. The NFL, being the NFL, was only and always going to do it without changing a thing.
This isn’t to say that the NFL wasn’t willing to do new things to make the season work, because the NFL was and is always eager to
do things. It’s just that the things the NFL did—feats of high-tech hygiene theater, weird stagey rationalization, statements written in the league’s trademark military-adjacent syntax—reflected the extent to which the league’s power players had refused to do the single most important thing they could have done:
learn how this pandemic works and act accordingly. There was a daunting challenge buried in all that: if teams responded to clubhouse outbreaks per pandemic-management best practices, this season would quickly become untenable. But also: what if everyone involved assessed the challenge in full, weighed the various options,
and just decided not to care? How might that work?
The NFL, under Roger Goodell, has always positioned itself as a sort of unofficial branch of the military, a gambit so oafishly overdetermined and under-reasoned that it was both ridiculous and kind of poignant. This time, though, the childish parody and the object of its devotion traded places. Trump’s administration approached the pandemic in the same way that NFL owners have traditionally approached everything—high-handedly, begrudgingly, and blithely secure in the knowledge that the consequences of their posturing and inaction were for other people to bear.
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Substituting wishful thinking and casual eugenics for actual action can’t work. But until the inexorable consequences arrive, that approach offers the comfort of the familiar and requires nothing more than a self-serving sort of faith. (“Any malcontents,” Mississippi State coach Mike Leach said after his team got wiped out by Kentucky last weekend, “we’re going to have to
purge a couple of those.”) The critical problem here is not that American culture abhors even the appearance of weakness, but about how much is built upon that belief, and about how that belief rewrites an increasingly brutal status quo into a legible natural order. Because the strongest win, the winners are the strongest. The diers mostly just die. If you believe this, a pandemic isn’t a problem to solve. It’s just two-a-days.