The big hurdles that our country faces pose major problems for sports as well. We need widespread testing and contact tracing but don’t have it. Fans won’t be allowed to attend events for months, a trend that might continue through the summer and into the fall, depending on what happens nationally with the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s so much that we don’t know right now. However, we do know that many leagues are trying to ramp their sports back up. Here’s a breakdown of where the major sports stand as well as a few others:
NFL
The entire NFL Draft was televised with coaches and general managers at home making their selections, and the tentative schedule for the 2020 season was released last week. Supposedly, the regular season will kick off with the Houston Texans visiting the defending Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs on Thursday, Sept. 10.
ESPN’s Kevin Seifert did a great primer on several unanswered questions going into the season. The league is currently doing virtual offseason workouts, the owners meeting will be held virtually, and training camps and preseason games may be shortened or canceled altogether.
There’s so much that we don’t know right now, and many things have to be worked out between the league and the NFL Players Association. Will we have adequate testing in place to test every player, coach, ref, and staff member? What happens if one player gets sick? Does the entire team have to self-quarantine? It’s near impossible to practice social distancing in a huddle or on a sideline.
For the owners, the thing they care about the most is playing regular-season games so they can rake in billions of dollars in TV money.
College Football
The top division of college football has 130 teams in 10 conferences across 41 states. With that many states, not everyone will be in the same position in terms of reopening. It’s more likely than not that some states and schools might have online classes in the fall, while others might have in-person classes.
There’s a good chance that various teams and conferences won’t start their seasons, which usually begin around Labor Day, at the same time.
NCAA President Mark Emmert was very clear last week when he spoke about the possibility of playing college football if students hadn’t returned to campus. He said, “If you don’t have students on campus, you don’t have student-athletes on campus … you’ve got to treat the health and well-being of the athletes at least as much as the regular students. So, if a school doesn’t reopen, then they’re not going to be playing sports. It’s really that simple.”
Even though Emmert seemed to draw a hard line, Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said that the conference could play with students taking online classes. Looks like nobody is really in charge!
The problem that conference commissioners, college presidents, and athletic directors face is very similar to the one that NFL owners are facing: They need the TV money. College football is a massive cash cow for programs in the Power 5 conferences.
You’re dealing with 18-23-year-old kids who aren’t paid but are incredibly valuable to the school. If almost all students stay home and take online classes, but football players are forced to return to campus and put themselves at risk of infection and death just so the schools can make money off of them, that would be a horrendous look for both the schools and the NCAA.
In addition to getting hit with lawsuits left and right, the NCAA’s argument for amateurism and saying that they’re looking after the welfare of student-athletes would disintegrate in the face of such bald and obvious greed.
Colleges and universities are desperate to make money from tuition to avoid financial ruin. Would they risk an outbreak, public health hazard, infections, and deaths just to get their tuition money and potentially enable themselves to play football in the fall?
Their situation is an absolute mess, and a bureaucratic mess at that.
NBA
Many teams are now able to reopen their practice facilities for individual workouts, but not many teams and players have gone forward with the idea. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver had a conference call with players last week and told them that if the league resumes the 2019-2020 season, fans will not be allowed to attend games. According to Shams Charania of the Athletic, fan attendance comprises 40% of the league’s revenue.
The NBA has a collective bargaining agreement with the NBA Players Association, so it’s in a similar situation where things will have to be negotiated. Nothing is finalized.
WNBA
After holding its draft virtually, the WNBA will have to wait to start its season. The only word from the WNBA on that is from its website: “In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the WNBA is postponing the start of the regular season originally scheduled for May 15. The WNBA continues to scenario plan regarding new dates and will provide updates accordingly.”
MLB
MLB owners decided to cut the draft down from its traditional 40 rounds to just five. The MLB Players Association had hoped to get the owners to have 10 rounds, but the owners wouldn’t play ball (pun intended).
Why did the owners, who have already proposed to cut 25% of minor league squads, decide to cut from 40 rounds to five? For a combined savings of less than $1 million per team.
Jacob deGrom, who has won back-to-back NL Cy Young Awards for the New York Mets, was drafted in the ninth round. There are a bunch of other baseball stars that were drafted from rounds six through 10. Billionaire owners refusing to shell out less than a million dollars for cheap and controllable talent that could turn into star players is pathetic.
Players agreed to prorated salaries for however many games are played, but the league wants them to take further pay cuts. Players, naturally, are against that.
As ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported, MLB owners presented their return-to-play proposal to players on Tuesday. Here’s some of the highlights in the proposal:
– An expansion of playoff teams from 10 to 14
– An 82-game season
– The use of home stadiums in areas that have local and state government approval
– A so-called spring training 2.0 that begins in June, with a season set for early July
– A universal designated hitter
– Geographical schedules, in which teams play only in-division opponents and interleague opponents in a similar area (i.e., American League Central teams play AL Central and National League Central teams)
You can probably guess what the entire agreement hinges on: money. Owners proposed a plan that includes a 50-50 revenue split with the players. MLB happens to be the only team sport in the U.S. that doesn’t have a salary cap, and the MLBPA immediately argued that restricting player pay based on revenues constitutes a salary cap and won’t accept it.
That brings us back to the players taking prorated salaries back in March. They already took pay cuts and almost definitely won’t accept another round of them.
Even if the league and the union figure all that out, they still have a plethora of potential problems that need answer. Many of those problems are highlighted in this one incredible Twitter thread from Washington Nationals closer Sean Doolittle.
Bear with me, but it feels like we’ve zoomed past the most important aspect of any MLB restart plan: health protections for players, families, staff, stadium workers and the workforce it would require to resume a season. Here are some things I’ll be looking for in the proposal…
— Obi-Sean Kenobi Doolittle (@whatwouldDOOdo) May 11, 2020
NHL
The league hasn’t given any guidance on if or when the regular season will resume, but there is some talk of the NHL Draft being held earlier in June instead of being held after the season is over.
Many executives and general managers are against this for obvious reasons. How would you determine the draft order if the season isn’t over? What would the salary cap look like? You also wouldn’t be able to trade players.
How can you deal with major changes and address needs when you already have a full team? That’s what free agency and the draft are designed to do — after the season is over.
A draft while the season is postponed seems like a recipe for disaster.
PGA TOUR
The PGA TOUR is aiming to restart in mid-June in Fort Worth, Texas, at the Charles Schwab Challenge.
The health and safety protocols for that event will be released soon. The Tour’s first four events (at least) will be held without fans in attendance.
The PGA Championship was pushed back but is still scheduled to be held at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco. The U.S. Open is still scheduled to be held at Winged Foot in New York and is scheduled for the week before the Ryder Cup in September. The Open Championship was canceled entirely, and the Masters is scheduled for November.
On Sunday, Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson will face off against Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in a charity skins match at Seminole Golf Club that will benefit COVID-19 relief efforts. The event will be televised and will follow strict Centers for Disease Control and Prevention social distancing guidelines.
The following week, on May 24, Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning will take on Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady at Medalist Golf Club. The match will raise funds for COVID-19 relief. It will also be televised and will have two different formats: four-ball for the first nine and modified alternate shot for the second nine.
LPGA Tour
The LPGA Tour, which is a global tour in every sense of the word, was way out in front in terms of postponing and canceling events due to the coronavirus. The LPGA Tour canceled three events in a row from February into March before making several more schedule adjustments.
The Tour, which is taking a financial beating from the hiatus, hopes to start back up in mid-July.
NASCAR
NASCAR is scheduled to return this week at Darlington Raceway on Sunday. Fans will not be in attendance. NASCAR altered its schedule and will also race in Darlington on May 20 before running two races at Charlotte Motor Raceway on May 24 and May 27.
NASCAR had been doing simulated invitational races but attracted some awful headlines when driver Kyle Larson casually dropped the N-word during an iRacing event. Larson was subsequently fired.
Denny Hamlin bookended the iRacing invitational series races with wins.
UFC
UFC held UFC 249 in Jacksonville, Florida, with no fans in attendance. By and large, it was a success. UFC is expected to hold more fights at the same location in the coming days.
However, one of the fighters tested positive before the event, so his fight was canceled. That’s a critical reason to have health and safety protocols in place. UFC did, and it paid off.
Esports/Overwatch League
One of the great benefits of esports is that they can be played online and streamed around the world. Many leagues have made the shift somewhat successfully.
The Overwatch League had ambitious plans to have legitimate home-and-away matches this season, but that fell apart once the pandemic set in.
The league has now moved online, but the level of play changes when you don’t have the teams together and lags appear because you can’t control the environment.
YouTube scored a major victory by winning the exclusive streaming rights for all of Activision Blizzard’s esports titles, including Overwatch League, but viewership has declined since the move from Twitch, the undisputed champion of esports and live gaming, to YouTube.
Overwatch League has been forced to make major adjustments to its broadcasts but is starting to find its footing even if viewers are having a hard time seeing the actual pros. I saw one “caster,” which is short for broadcaster, tweet out apologies after a match for not being at her best.
That’s not to say that things are all sunshine and roses for Overwatch League. Its biggest star, who played for the defending champions, left for another esport called VALORANT.
Earlier this month, the Vancouver Titans, who lost in the Grand Finals in their first-ever season as an organization, dumped their head coach and best player. Then, a week later, they jettisoned the rest of the team.
The Titans dominated to an extent that had never been seen before in the two-year history of the league but were bested in the finals by an outstanding San Francisco Shock squad.
Players have been retiring left and right. While they’re able to be replaced, the quality of the content suffers. It’s much harder for teams to practice together, communicate together, work together, and compete together when they’re all in different places. Many are in different countries.
Overwatch League and many other esports will continue to chug along, but the season represents just a fraction of what Blizzard hoped it could be.
Noah Niederhoffer (@NNiederhoffer) is a producer at SiriusXM and a graduate of the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives in Washington, D.C.
Update: This piece has been updated with new information about Major League Baseball’s proposal for restarting play.
