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Only eight teams in NFL history have reached the Super Bowl the season after losing it.
Will the 49ers become the ninth?
More importantly, can they be the fourth to win it the season after losing?
Those are the big questions hanging over the 49ers as they head into their season opener Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals at Levi’s Stadium. But there are larger questions ahead of Week 1 related not to football but to a 100-year pandemic and a new civil rights movement.
Should they even be playing football?
For the NFL, it never has been a question of “should we.” From the beginning, it has been a question of “can we.”
The NFL and the other major professional sports leagues are nothing more than sanctioned cartels of team owners with the clear goal of making more and more cash every year. And there’s not a league in North America — not even the uber-rich NFL — that can afford, literally, to not have a season.
Back-of-napkin math says the NFL can break even without ticket revenue from fans in the stands; multi-billion dollar television deals make up the majority of the league’s revenue.
If the NFL didn’t play, it would lose that TV money and likely be undercut in future negotiations on that front.
Is there a risk from the coronavirus? Of course.
But for the NFL, the risk of not playing was greater.
So why is the NFL not in a bubble?
The success of the NBA and NHL bubbles — closed-off environments created to keep the virus out — is enviable. Neither league has registered a positive test inside the closed environments. But the NFL surely did a cost-benefit analysis of putting teams in regional groups or a national hub and decided against it. That would have been really expensive.
The NFL believes that its once-a-week game model is better suited to creating the necessary 32 mini-bubbles. The NFL is probably right about this.
Teams have operated for years as if they were in a bubble when traveling to games, going straight from team facilities to private planes to locked-down hotels. Team-only buses take players right to locker room doors and then back to those private planes.
The league has extensive virus-prevention protocols for team facilities these days. The NFL also reportedly has threatened heavy fines for skipping testing and not wearing masks in facilities. But those protocols and fines don’t extend into players’ homes. That’s where this could break down.
Credit to the teams and players, though. There were 44,510 tests administered in the week ending Sept. 5, and only one player tested positive for COVID-19.
What happens if there is an outbreak?
The threat of an outbreak is omnipresent. But the show must go on and, in most cases, it will.
The NFL has expanded its reserve teams — the practice squad — for this season. Every team has 16 players in that pool it can sign to its main roster. They can also sign unprotected players on other practice squads and free agents off the street.
Managing injuries has always been a massive part of football. This pandemic takes that to a whole new level, but the official response will be the same if someone goes down: next man up.
What about the fans?
Eight of the 32 NFL teams plan to open their stadium to spectators this season, albeit in limited numbers. A crowd announced at 15,895 was on hand Thursday night at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City when the reigning Super Bowl champion Chiefs opened their season with a win over the Houston Texans.
The other teams planning to play to live crowds: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Miami. That list could grow as the season goes on. Only the Raiders (in Las Vegas) and the team in Washington have said they will be closed all season.
The 49ers will be fan-free to start the season and given California’s rules, that seems unlikely to change, even if things continue to improve on the COVID front.
What’s the NFL doing with the social justice moment?
More than 70 percent of NFL players are Black, but the league has consistently fallen short on racial issues, never more so than in the case of Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest and subsequent free agency.
But now, after decades of trying to hand off the political football, the NFL is trying something new.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” — aka the Black national anthem —will be played before every Week 1 game. Players will be allowed to display on their helmets the names of victims of systemic racism and police violence. Coaches and team personnel are allowed to wear anti-racism patches, as well.
The NFL has four sanctioned anti-racism patches for this season. This is still corporate, after all. They are Stop Hate, End Racism, Black Lives Matter, and It Takes All of Us.
The last one, it should be noted, is also the league’s whitewashed rallying cry to defeat COVID-19.
So, back to the 49ers: Will they do it?
They were six minutes away from winning the Super Bowl last February in Miami, their sixth overall and their first in 26 years. They were ahead 20-10 more than halfway through the fourth quarter. They lost 31-20.
The last team to win the Super Bowl one year after losing it was the New England Patriots in 2018. Before that, you have to go back to the 1971 Dallas Cowboys and the 1972 Miami Dolphins. That’s three teams in almost 50 years.
I’m betting on the 49ers to become the fourth.
