The NFL seems to be realizing that it may not be able to bend the world to its will this time. According to a report from John Ourand and Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, the league has discussed pushing back the season and eliminating bye weeks. Everything is on the table as long as it leads to a full 16-game season.
“When the schedule is released next month, it will look like a standard 16-game, 17-week slate,” Ourand and Fischer write. “but it will be designed to allow for several steps that could become necessary depending on the state of the pandemic.”
Brian Rollap, the NFL Executive Vice President of Media, said last month that the league is planning to release its 2020 schedule on May 9. SBJ reports that schedule makers are working to make that happen, and that the league has even said that the 2020 schedule could be released early.
One option that has been discussed it moving the first two weeks of a normal 2020 schedule to the back end and adding a third week of games matching up teams with identical bye weeks. Starting the season as late as mid-October is also on the table.
Any delay in the season is also likely to result in a delay in the post-season. The league is looking at an option that could push the Super Bowl all the way back to the final day of February 2021.
