Al Davis made his personal football mantra a bedrock of NFL thinking, but these days, “Just win, baby,” has been usurped by a more basic weekly directive.
Just play, baby.
No quarterbacks available on your roster? Play the game. Two dozen players on the reserve/COVID-19 list? Play the game. No home to go to after your county bans all contact sports? Play the game.
For those in the back who might have missed it, play the game.
If Week 12 and all its challenges didn’t sway the NFL powers that be from their devotion to completing the 2020 season, then it’s increasingly obvious that nothing will.
If the Broncos suiting up a recently signed practice squad wide receiver to play quarterback didn’t serve as reason to hit the pause button; if the Ravens’ ongoing barrage of positive tests can’t get a thrice-postponed game canceled or moved to a potential Week 18; if the 49ers suddenly finding themselves homeless and headed to Arizona, then it’s time to abandon the debate about whether what the NFL is doing is wise. That ship has sailed.
The discussion now is whether the league is doing itself irreparable harm. The same stubbornness that has made “protecting the shield” such a driving force of NFL thinking could end up staining the league with lasting negative consequences.
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Obviously, the primary hope is that there are no lasting health problems for any players or team personnel who have (or will contract) COVID-19. But beyond that, the disdain the NFL is showing for competitive advantage can’t be ignored, running counter to everything the parity-driven league has espoused for decades.
With entire chapters of the rule book dedicated to protecting the quarterback, how does it make sense to let the Broncos take the field without one, and to do so against a Saints team fighting for the top seed in the NFC? The Saints took their walkover, 31-3, but no one should feel good about the product that was on the field Sunday.
When Denver safety Kareem Jackson wondered whether the NFL was “just making an example of us,” he made a lot of sense, given that the league is now managing outbreaks that earlier in the year (Patriots-Chiefs anyone?) were cause for postponement.
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With both the Broncos and Ravens admitting to in-house flaws in following pandemic protocols — the Broncos for not wearing masks in the quarterback room, the Ravens for having a symptomatic strength coach who continued to work — the league is letting them pay their own price.
It’s precisely what teams were told in October, when a league memo included the following: “Absent medical considerations, games will not be postponed or rescheduled simply to avoid roster issues caused by injury or illness affecting multiple players, even within a position group.”
Doesn’t Kendall Hinton know it? If the four Broncos QBs in quarantine don’t give their game checks to Hinton, shame on them. A former college quarterback who switched to receiver his senior year at Wake Forest, Hinton handled his moment in the spotlight with class. He did his best (one completion, two interceptions) after a couple of hours of practice. But that doesn’t change the farcical situation that put him in that spotlight in the first place.
Meanwhile, the Ravens-Steelers game was postponed again, until Wednesday night, even though Baltimore is missing some of its skill-position starters on offense. No Lamar Jackson, no Mark Andrews, no Willie Snead. For a team clinging to playoff hopes against a still-undefeated one that is fighting for the AFC’s top seed, that’s a tough ask.
It’s a shame that this latest entry to one of the best rivalries in the game is so overshadowed, and if the Steelers win as easily as the Saints did (which they should), the competitive imbalance rears its ugly head once again.
Of course, we get it. The NFL’s only stated concern is health, whether a team’s specific outbreak is traceable and therefore containable, as in the case with the Broncos. In those cases, the game is played because the risk of further transmission is so low.
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But when outbreaks are ongoing, as had been the case in Baltimore from the original Thanksgiving time slot to a potential Sunday kickoff, postponements can happen. But there are only so many days in a week, and only so many weeks in the year, and time could run out on all of it.
The fact that the game is now Wednesday makes it obvious how much the NFL wants to avoid a Week 18 and/or an expanded playoff pool.
For the league, when it comes to playing the game, it’s business at usual. As a Baltimore Sun story detailed Monday, the value of the NFL’s broadcast rights is more than $5 billion annually, and a recent eight-year extension of “Monday Night Football” on ESPN was worth $15.2 billion.
When 19 of the 50 most-watched prime-time telecasts in 2019 were NFL games, when four of the top five were NFL games, it’s no surprise how badly all parties want that business to remain usual.
No matter how much havoc coronavirus wreaks on player pools or television schedules, the games will go on. If Monday morning quarterbacking is a tried-and-true NFL tradition, from elevating wins beyond their importance to decrying losses as far more damaging than they really are, the day for analyzing everything about a Sunday’s worth of scheduled games is no longer focused only on the stats and scores.
Here, in the time of COVID-19, it’s on the fact that they were played at all.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.