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Let’s All Agree This NFL Season Needs An Asterisk

When the San Francisco 49ers take the field against the Green Bay Packers, the amount of injured, Covid19 list players is too much to allow this game to be played and still call it an NFL game. But the NFL was dead set on plowing ahead, and as long as they didn’t have any positive tests this morning, and they didn’t, they would leave the others behind and force these teams to play at half strength.

Thursday Night Football games are generally weak, to begin with. But this one is ridiculous. It’s already being billed as the 49ers are playing without their receivers and the Packers without their running backs. Great! Why not push the game to another time. I think it’s better to play this game, a meaningful one, with shorter rest rather than fulfilling the televised game. Just make this game a Tuesday night game, something like that, and move on, but the NFL didn’t want to do that.

The NFL can talk about their testing, and that’s great, but the integrity of the game has been affected to the point that this won’t look good a few years down the road. That’s not to say a bad team is going to win the Super Bowl, but the NFL East will probably have a six-win team win the division, that’s a good place to start.

With all their flaws, Major League Baseball did a better job, not that the Marlins weren’t down a lot of players at times, but it didn’t affect the play enough towards the entire season to raise a fuss and I would still add an asterisk. The NFL has to play one game a week per team. And they have bye weeks, so there’s absolutely no reason to play a game where both teams, are compromised to the point where commentators throw up their hands and say, “That’s football in 2020”. That’s bad, and it’s bad for the game.

New York Jets Issues

Joe Douglas finally spoke to the media. He said he underestimated to market value for Robby Anderson, no kidding. They gave him away and now he realizes that was wrong. Moving on from that, he says that Adam Gase will be part of the solution, so that’s why he wasn’t fired? Ok, and Sam Darnold is the quarterback of the future, still? Even with a shot at getting Trevor Lawrence? My take is Chris Johnson won’t fire Gase, so Douglas is stuck and his job may be tied to turning Gase around. As far as Lawrence, I wonder if they sense that he won’t play for them, so they are doing the right thing by Darnold. I’m fine with that, but the right thing would have been keeping Anderson and building a better offensive line this year, Douglas failed at that this season. The Jets are a mess right now, but I could see them winning a game or two spoiling their chance at getting the top pick. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

Russ_Cohen
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