Thus far, there’s been no indication the 2020 NFL season will be derailed by the coronavirus pandemic.
The upcoming campaign very well could go on as scheduled, but the McCourty brothers are struggling to conceptualize how the league will manage to do so safely.
It’s been rumored teams will be eligible to kick off training camp in late July. As that reported benchmark nears, Devin and Jason McCourty aired out their concerns over the NFL returning during the latest episode of their “Double Coverage” podcast.
More Patriots: Mohamed Sanu, Jarrett Stidham Have Back-And-Forth On Instagram
“I think everybody’s nervous, because the norm is that we just go to work — we put in a lot of work, we bond together, we lift, we’re in close quarters,” Devin said, as transcribed by ESPN. It feels like that’s all being taken away from us, so I don’t know how to react. I don’t know what’s it’s going to be.
“I love how a lot of players’ attention has been on what’s going on outside of football, and I think we’ll continue to do that. But figuring out football, to me, seems to be the hardest thing right now. We hope, but I don’t know if we’ll figure it out, honestly.”
Jason added: “For me, there would be no coming together to do any type of practice with teammates, because I just think we can’t dismiss with corona and everything going on. I’ve been out here in Nashville, and I actually go run at the high school where I think a lot of the 49ers players were doing their team-practice ordeal. They just had a player or two test positive, (according to a NFL Network report).
“It’s kind of scary because something like that, I think it was probably just offense, so they probably had maybe 10 guys out there. When you think about the future, if it’s hard for 10 guys just to get together to do little passing drills or anything of that nature, to think about somewhere between 53 and 90 guys in a training camp, it’s going to be insane. So I don’t know how that’s going to turn out.”
The McCourtys’ concerns certainly are warranted. For what it’s worth, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently sounded pretty skeptical about the idea of football being played this season.
