The National Football League Player’s Association coronavirus task force is looking at several factors to decide when and how football will return for the 2020 season.
“We will look at how teams will train, how they will travel and how the games will take place,” Kansas City Chiefs right guard and doctor of medicine, Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, who is on the task force chaired by Thom Mayer, medical director for the NFLPA, shared with Sports Illustrated magazine in its cover story out Monday. (RELATED: REPORT: Coachella Potentially Rescheduled To October Due To Coronavirus Fears)
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“And, since this is the NFL, a league with a lot of resources, it seems like every option is on the table,” he added. “For now, we’re just getting started.” (RELATED: Here Are The Members Of Congress Self-Quarantining After Meeting Person With Coronavirus At CPAC)
However, he stopped short of saying when he thinks football will “come back” during the pandemic.
“It’s too soon to say when sports might come back,” the Chiefs’ player explained. “Or what that might look like. What I can say is if we’re not playing in September, knowing all the implications of what sport means for a nation and the money behind this huge industry, there are going to be bigger issues than not playing football.”
NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith shared with ESPN earlier this month that “mass testing” might be the key to a return for football.
“The benchmarks that it seems that are somewhat consistent is the need for mass testing,” Smith explained. “I haven’t heard anyone who hasn’t emphasized mass testing in the community for measuring how and to what extent things can return to somewhat normalcy.”
“I don’t have the answers right now,” he added. “Knowing the availability of widespread testing is something we would definitely want to know — the availability of kits. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in a situation where we are making a choice to taking test resources away from some group of people to provide them to another group of people.”
Smith continued, “That raises ethical issues. We’d also want to know the information that’s coming from that test … what’s coming from that test?”