Do Major League Baseball’s woes portend badly for 2020 NFL season?

31 July 2020

The three major North American sports leagues scheduled to resume play have shown mixed results in their startup/restart efforts in the year of coronavirus – but most of all MLB’s troubles concern NFL fans (and bettors!) the most.

The NBA re-tips off the 2019-20 season tonight, July 30, in the Orlando bubble. We’ll have to wait and see how much the physicality and close proximity of players spikes the incidences of coronavirus cases among the teams but since the bubble was sealed (presuming that is the correct verb), the NBA is on a run of 10 days without a new positive case.

Also resuming is the NHL, in two bubbles stationed in Toronto and Edmonton. This league has gone a week without a positive, which some are crediting to Canada’s low rates of Covid-19 relative to the US generally, which in turn can be attributed to … ah, NFLbets isn’t gonna go there…

Then there’s Major League Baseball, who apparently relished the chance to again whiff in the clutch to instead go with the idea that essentially nothing will change with regard to travel or enforcing certain day-to-day activities. Just a week into the 2020 irregular season, the Miami Marlins have tested some 19 players (and counting?) positive, which led to the “postponement” of two games against the Washington Nationals.

Most recently, one, no, now three *staff members* of the Philadelphia Phillies tested positive after their team’s series with Marlins – including an 11-6 win in which Miami was down 17 players to Covid including starters at pitcher, catcher, first base and leftfield. O, and Phillies have now shut down all activity at Veterans Park “until further notice.”

So here’s the NFL, famous for its disregard for player safety and its players well aware of the brevity of career, once again looking to have all the football with the maximum exploitation. One would think that the players of  a contact sport likesay, football or basketball or hockey , would be even more at risk at contracting coronavirus that baseball players. But in their infinite wisdom, the NFL (at least originally) has decided upon having its cake and eating it, too, with no bubble in a full contact sport.

You know how Trump wanted to stop the CDC from releasing test case numbers so that America would appear to have no new cases? Cancellation of the 2020 preseason (and thus a new season of Hard Knocks, o darn) is a good Trumpian tactic to help “prove” that NFL players needn’t worry about coronavirus spread, because there are no cases detected.

And at the one pilot event for football sans social distancing in the time of coronavirus, namely Tampa Bay Buccaneers workouts for Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and 10 of their new teammates, one positive case has resulted – after a handful of coaches and staff also showed positive.

The point of all this from NFLbets’ perspective? If you can find a “Will the 2020 NFL season be played?”, the betting on NO is looking better all the time…