Football starts this week, kind of, I guess?

The Jacksonville Jaguars are set to hit the practice field on Wednesday, March 92nd. It feels surreal, but football at least for now, is going to be hitting the field for practice this week. The team has been in doing things like virtual meetings, going on and off the COVID-19 list etc., but real actual practice starts on Wednesday.

I am simultaneously horrified and excited.

As of my typing this, it sounds like college football is going to cancel the 2020 season, or perhaps do some Frankenstein super conference which will probably end up a disaster, but as it stands the NFL is trudging forward and that’s what the money tells them to do.

The preseason has already been cancelled and teams haven’t actually physically practiced yet, so the next week or so is going to tell us a lot about the NFL moving forward. With everything going on, it still feels weird in my brain to just accept the NFL is trudging along like normal, but here we are.

On one had it’s nice to have a distraction and an escape, but on the other hand I am genuinely curious what the hell the NFL is going to do once the inevitable positive tests happen. Outside of the NBA bubble, which just isn’t feasible for the NFL for multiple reasons, most other sports in the U.S. have run into outbreak issues. The St. Louis Cardinals are have only played five games this MLB season due to a rash of positive tests with staff and players, meaning they’ve postponed quite a few series.

How is this going to work with an NFL team? MLB isn’t very contact heavy and it has already been a problem. The NFL is full-on contact, with players constantly on top of each other and things like body fluids being strewn about on every play. It seems highly likely there is an outbreak on a team, so how does it get handled.

Do you quarantine the whole team? You just skip a week? How does that work?

Normally we’d be doing roster breakdowns and training camp battles, but honestly I have no idea how any of this is going to work.

The morbid curiosity in me just wants to see what the hell they do, but I can’t help but think the season will ultimately, at best, be delayed or truncated.

Think about it. What happens if Patrick Mahomes tests positive? Do you quarantine the whole offensive line? Running backs?

Anyway, the Jaguars practice this week, so lets hope for the best.