The NFL is pretending that everything is fine. But the mask is starting to slip, writes williamfleitch
You might not be seeing any of this for a while. Photo: David Eulitt/Getty Images From the beginning of the coronavirus’s takeover of American life, one national institution has gotten away with basically pretending that nothing out of the ordinary is happening: The NFL. Largely because of the timing of COVID-19’s arrival on our shores — just after football season ended — the NFL has been able to keep its calendar intact in a way that no other American sports league can.
The NFL has as much to lose as any professional sports outfit if games don’t come back this year. No league has benefited more from television networks’ reliance on live sports programming. The league has contracts with CBS, FOX, ESPN, NBC, DirectTV, Yahoo, and Facebook that bring in more than $5 billion a year — contracts that, by the way, it was looking to renegotiate after ratings rose last year. But those contracts are of course reliant on there being actual games to broadcast.
But there’s still a lot of peril ahead for Roger Goodell and co., arguably even more so than for its competitors. Maybe baseball can figure out its Arizona plan and maybe it can’t; maybe the NBA can close out its season and maybe it can’t. But there is reason to believe that baseball and basketball can be played in America soon.
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