Desperate sports fans turn to the NFL after reality of first weekend with no games | Opinion
So I’m channel-surfing on Sunday, a junkie looking for a fix. The new reality is closing in. No sports. Suddenly my heart races. I stumble upon a college basketball game!
I thought all conference tournaments had been canceled or cut short by the coronavirus/COVID-19 threat, but here were Virginia Commonwealth and Dayton, playing on CBS for the Atlantic 10 men’s championship. I settled in with a smile. Couldn’t name a single player in the game. Didn’t care. It was a sporting event! With a cheering crowd!
A small island of normalcy in a roiling sea!
It turned out to be a telecast from 2015.
Yes, a small-conference game played five years ago, on network television.
That’s where we are now, and, man, did we get here fast ...
This was The Weekend That Wasn’t, the first weekend without games after the global pandemic almost completely swallowed sports, with the NBA, MLB, NHL, Major League Soccer, NCAA and others all shutting down for the foreseeable future.
NFL free agency commenced Monday as usual. So that’s something, at least. Suddenly sports junkies are paying attention to news they’d otherwise care nothing about.
Monday’s Dan Le Batard Show on ESPN Radio opened with, “The Tampa Bay Bucs have franchised Shaq Barrett!”
We are all dealing with something strange and scary and totally foreign to us. Phrases like “social distancing” and “self-quarantining” are now a part of or lives.
Frozen isn’t just a Disney movie. It’s now the state of our sports, and our lives.
“How to Wash Your Hands” is a new tutorial video from the New York Times.
People continue to inexplicably horde toilet paper.
Grocery stores and Netflix are doing great, thanks. The rest of the economy is pretty much screeching to a halt.
A Chattanooga man traveled around buying up 17,700 hand sanitizers to sell for profit before being stopped by Amazon and the Tennessee attorney general, and being shamed into giving them away for free.
He might be the worst person on Earth.
Tied for the second worst: All of the people still socializing and partying and behaving selfishly because 1) they do not follow current events and thus are unaware of the coronavirus threat; 2) they think the whole thing is a massive hoax; 3) they believe the pandemic for some reason doesn’t threaten them; or 4) they are just state-of-the-art, world-class idiots.
For many of us, the sudden erasure of sports from our lives is a huge part of the upheaval of our daily rhythms, the shutdown slapping us hard on how dangerous this virus threat really is.
Suddenly, LeBron James and Mike Trout are a lot less important in our lives than the empty water shelves at the supermarket.
There are isolated outliers. UFC chief Dana White defiantly (and stupidly) insists his fight cards will continue. At least until somebody hopefully makes him stop. A rugby match went on in northern England with a full crowd over the weekend.
Eerily, Gulfstream Park in Hallandale ran races on Saturday, but with no spectators allowed. (It’s a tree-falls-in-the-forest thing. If horse races with nobody watching, did it really happen?)
NFL free agency goes on, and should, because this involves contracts and money and players changing uniforms. It is not a spectator sport. Does not draw a “large public gathering.” Yet it intensely interests football fans at a time people staying at home and away from other people sort of need the diversion.
NFL free agency and then the draft, still scheduled for April 23-25 in Las Vegas -- but without the street party crowd element, the league announced Monday -- are about all we’ll have in sports for awhile. Our tether to normalcy.
The march of basketball and hockey toward their playoffs is on indefinite hold. So are the starts of baseball and soccer seasons. We should be filling out NCAA brackets today, but that’s all gone, too.
At least we have football to help us survive no games.
Will the Dolphins do something big in free agency and then draft Tua Tagovailoa after all?
Can you believe that huge contact the Titans gave Ryan Tannehill?
Will Tom Brady re-up with the Patriots because nobody else seems to want him?
These are things to ponder as you hunt for hand sanitizer or a case of water, if you dare leave the house at all.
These are things to take the mind off the coronavirus if only for a sweet minute.
This story was originally published March 16, 2020 at 12:50 PM.
