Four key moments enabled the NFL, its teams and players to pull off the season amid COVID-19 pandemic

As Super Bowl 55 draws nigh, the NFL is poised to pull off what once seemed impossible: deliver a full-scale football season amid a global pandemic, on schedule and without interruption or major outbreak.

No one could have truly predicted this. Not the highest-ranking NFL officials and medical experts, not the most head-strong and influential owners, not the coaches, staffers and players. They all hoped. They prayed. But anyone within the league would probably now admit that despite their determination and optimism, they embarked on this mission with a great deal of uncertainty and trepidation.

In the rarest of occurrences, the all-powerful NFL was at the mercy of a force stronger than The Shield itself. The league and its owners have always operated with a prideful sense of invincibility – unbending, unstoppable and beholden to no one.

COVID-19 changed all of that. 

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But the NFL now stands on the doorstep of this improbable victory because the unyielding league proved capable of operating with flexibility, compliance and a willingness to take its losses on once unthinkable fronts. 

Four key moments led to this point.

First, league and NFLPA leaders had to answer the question: “Can and should we play?” Then, they had to determine what such an arrangement would look like while making concessions in key areas. The NFL had to weather a storm that threatened to upend the entire operation less than a month into the season. And from there, everyone had to demonstrate an ability to learn and deliver an adequate crisis response that would guide it through the remainder of the season.

“We’re one game away,” NFLPA president and Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter said. “If you took a poll before the season started from a lot of people in the community, getting to the Super Bowl in the same amount of time with only tiny changes to the schedule, that was not the expectation. A ton of credit goes to our players as well as every person that stepped in those buildings doing the right thing and following the protocols. … We knew we would have to evolve and adapt our protocol throughout the year. There were big decisions made that kept us going.”

‘Can and should we play?’

NFL executives and owners and the NFL Players Association leaders didn’t even get a full month to revel in the 10-year labor agreement they reached last March. In fact, the official ratification of the new collective bargaining agreement hadn’t even taken place when it became apparent the pandemic would change life so drastically that another mini-CBA would have to be agreed upon if a 2020 season were to take place.

Coronavirus numbers had begun to rise across the country, and state governments imposed lockdowns, banning large gatherings, which meant there would be no packed stadiums in 2020.

Business would change, but at the same time, the league is a $16 billion industry, so in the eyes of owners, too much money was at stake to not hold a season.

The players also stood to lose a lot of money by not playing, which would impact how they provided for their families, so they, too, started a search for answers and solutions. Each side began consulting medical experts and government officials for guidance.

“Right away, we were figuring out not how, but if we should have a season and what it would look like and what it would need to look like,” Tretter said.

The NFL’s chief medical officer, Dr. Allen Sills, explained that during regular communication with the players union, medical experts and the White House’s COVID-19 task force, the league and union remained mindful of how a season would impact the communities its teams call home.

“We didn’t want to do anything that would deter or damage public health efforts,” Sills said. “We had regular conversations about, ‘Is there an adequate testing supply that we could use to deploy at the manner that we think is safest for our coaches and staff?’ We eventually evolved to daily testing. We set up a completely independent supply and logistic pipeline. At no time during the season did we go and pursue testing with any health care agency or existing hospital because we thought it very important that we not do anything that interfered with the care of patients, with the overall public health response.”

Two sticking points

Despite a “significant number of disagreements” at the outset of negotiations between the owners and players on what a COVID-19 impacted season would look like, the sides eventually hammered out the framework of protocols that would carry them through a dramatically altered preseason.

The owners were willing to scrap all preseason games to give players adequate time to condition for football. The sides agreed on protocols that wound up changing roughly a dozen times as the season progressed. Both sides agreed, however, that central, regional or even individual team bubbles would not be practical or effective for players and coaches.

Both sides understood concessions would have to be made, but the players were adamant they would not proceed with a season without the owners’ willingness to agree to two major sticking points: daily testing and opt-out provisions.

“We moved on to, ‘How do we make the league provide the safest work environment possible?’ ” Tretter explained. “We had a team full of amazing experts that helped lead us here and our biggest thing was following the science, following the data and making our decisions and pathways forward off of that information, and the next thing was allowing guys to be able to opt out and have a choice and not force them back to work if they did not feel comfortable."

The NFLPA’s medical team believed the only way to closely monitor, promptly identify and quickly react to help avoid spread of coronavirus throughout team facilities was to test daily. The NFL’s medical experts felt the same way. After initially agreeing to just provide daily testing throughout the preseason, the owners agreed to continue the requirement throughout the regular season.

Meanwhile, the league said it would grant players opt outs of between $150,000 (for voluntary opt-outs) and $350,000 (for players  who fell in the high-risk category). A total of 67 players opted out.

On July 24 – days before training camps originally would have opened – the owners and players agreed to a modified CBA, paving a way for the season. There would be a price.

Daily testing for every player, coach and medical staff member (at $100 a pop) would translate into roughly 950,000 tests over the course of the season and a price tag of $95 million. Setting up on-site testing centers for every team, contracting regional laboratories and the provision of electronic tracking devices for every player, coach and staff member would push the COVID-related bill above $100 million, according to people familiar with the deliberations. Those people requested anonymity because the figures are not public. And with fan attendance restrictions still in place, the league projected to lose roughly $3 billion.

But a payoff still remained because of the nearly $10 billion in TV contracts coming the league’s way.

Titanic outbreak

Despite the modified training camp schedule, the NFL’s regular season did indeed kick off on time, and things ran relatively smoothly for nearly a month. Then in Week 4, COVID-19 dealt the NFL a blow that seemed like a potential foreshadowing of challenges that could potentially derail the season.

In the week leading up to the Tennessee Titans’ fourth game of the season, the team experienced an outbreak that began with a positive test for a coach and then spread through the organization to include 23 positive cases.

Titans head coach Mike Vrabel guided Tennessee through the league’s first COVID-19 outbreak. (Photo: Wade Payne, AP)

Initially, the hope was that a couple of days of virtual meetings instead of physical practices would enable team medical officials to pinpoint the source and allow them to contain the virus, and so the Titans’ Week 4 game against Pittsburgh remained on schedule. But as more Titans players and coaches continued to test positive, the league had no choice but to postpone the game.

Doing so meant all kinds of logistical gymnastics for the NFL’s schedule-makers. The Titans’ Week 7 was used for the playing of the game with Pittsburgh, and the Steelers’ Week 7 matchup with Baltimore was moved to Week 8.

The Titans’ Week 5 matchup with Buffalo also was pushed back two days.

The Pittsburgh-Tennessee reshuffling sparked a belief that there was no way the NFL could expect to make it through the 13 remaining weeks of the season without rescheduling more games. League officials began discussing contingency plans that could include adding a week to the regular season so COVID-19-scrapped games could be made up in a Week 18. That would mean pushing back the start of the playoffs.

The league did have wiggle room because it eliminated the physical Pro Bowl, leaving an open week on the schedule just before the Super Bowl. Officials even discussed contingency plans on determining a playoff field in the event some teams managed to complete a regular 16-game schedule while others did not.

High-risk close contacts

An extended regular season and modified postseason wound up not being necessary. That’s because the league learned a lesson from the Titans’ case, and that wound up changing the way teams reacted to positive cases, which very well may have saved the season.

That development involved the identification of what the league classified as “high-risk, close contacts.”

As it monitored and tracked positive cases, the NFL’s 18-member contact tracer team and its medical experts learned it was possible for individuals to contract the virus between two and five days after being exposed. The league’s medical team determined that people who had come in contact with a COVID-positive person without wearing masks and/or while indoors were at higher risk for infection. The decision was  made to send those high-risk close contacts into quarantine  in hope of preventing further spread throughout team facilities.

That high-risk close contact-related modification to the protocol provided salvation to the league and its teams, because more than 40 of those individuals designated as high-risk close contacts wound up later testing positive for coronavirus while they were in isolation.

The identification of high-risk close contacts helped cut down on the spread of coronavirus. And the implementation of intensive protocols, which limited the number of days players and coaches were permitted at facilities, banned in-person meetings and required face coverings even during practices helped the league minimize the number of positive cases. Two teams experienced mini-outbreaks, Baltimore in late November and Cleveland in late December. But league officials attributed those cases to the holiday seasons and not anything within the organizations.

“I don’t think people have given enough credit to the contact tracing,” Sills said. “It’s a seven-day-a-week job. They’re doing it at nighttime, they’re doing it on holidays. They were doing it on Christmas Day, for example. That team of individuals … they’ve been absolute warriors in helping us get to this point.”

As the postseason approached, leaving the league with little flexibility from a scheduling standpoint, questions arose as to whether teams would shift to individual bubbles to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. But NFL and NFLPA officials remained confident in the structure of their protocols, believing in the vigilant approach.

Sure enough, the 14 playoff teams made it without COVID-19 interruptions, bringing the NFL to the doorstep of the Super Bowl. As Super Bowl week kicks off, of the roughly 950,000 tests administered, 262 players and 462 team personnel members have tested positive, which translated into a positivity rate of 0.076. According to the Johns Hopkins website, one threshold for the percent positive being “too high” is 5%. 

“One case is one too many,” NFLPA medical director Dr. Thom Mayer said, “but, that said, I think it would’ve been hard to get odds that we would get through 256 regular-season games and playoffs. … We had to be willing and ready to react and adapt just like a good linebacker does. … It really was a journey of being extraordinarily well-informed by the experts we contracted with and being agile to change things as we needed to.”

But league officials, union executives and the remaining teams all continue to hold their breath. They’ve described themselves as “counting the days,” admittedly anxious but cautiously optimistic that the same vigilance that guided them through the season can push them across the finish line on Sunday.

Follow USA TODAY Sports’ Mike Jones on Twitter @ByMikeJones and listen to the Football Jones podcast on iTunes.

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