COVID-19 postponed an Eagles game and allowed us to look past football’s greater risks | Mike Sielski

On Tuesday — three days before the NFL postponed the Eagles’ upcoming game against the Washington Football Team because so many of Washington’s players had tested positive for COVID-19 — the results of two autopsies were revealed to the public. Both men who died had played professional football. In fact, it was likely that both men died because they had played professional football, and you could argue persuasively that people who had not played professional football died because one of the men played professional football.

The first of these men was Vincent Jackson, who over his 12 seasons as an NFL wide receiver caught 540 passes, 57 of which went for touchdowns. His body had been found in a Bradenton, Fla., hotel room in February. He was 38. The second was Phillip Adams, who had been a defensive back with six teams during his six-year career. He was 32 when, on April 7 in Rock Hill, S.C., he shot and killed five people — a doctor, the doctor’s wife, two of the doctor’s grandchildren, and a man who had been working at the doctor’s home — before shooting himself in the head.

Jackson and Adams were diagnosed posthumously with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain disease — caused by the head trauma so common in football — that can lead to depression, mood swings, and violent behavior. “These results have become commonplace,” neuropathologist Ann McKee, the head of Boston University’s CTE Center, said in a statement.

In the wake of this news, no one affiliated with the NFL said that the league ought to postpone any games to consider the ramifications of continuing to play football. No players said that they were fearful of suiting up. Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, said nothing about Jackson and Adams at all.

But the Eagles and Washington will play on Tuesday. They will play two days after their originally scheduled date even though the WFT’s doctor, Tony Casolaro, told reporters last week that, based on the symptoms (or lack thereof) experienced by the 23 COVID-positive players on Washington’s roster, he would have allowed 21 of them to practice.

I’m drawing this comparison, between CTE and COVID, not to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic but to note one of its deleterious effects. COVID is Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, sowing chaos by scrambling our customary assessment and acceptance of risk, and in few areas of our society and culture is that confusion starker than it is in the popularity of professional football.

“You know what I’ve noticed?” The Joker says in the film. “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan,’ even if the plan is horrifying.” And he’s right. The reason that so few people are panicked about CTE is that it is part of football’s plan. I don’t mean that the NFL or its coaches or its players have set out to inflict a deadly disease upon each other. I mean that all of us — those who oversee, compete in, follow, or just love professional football — have come to expect and, to one degree or another, accept the costs of professional football. Even when those costs are horrifying.

Yet until the NFL revamped its COVID protocols Saturday, until it stopped treating asymptomatic vaccinated players in the same manner it treated symptomatic and/or unvaccinated players, it was willing to upend several teams’ seasons to guard against a danger that, statistically speaking, doesn’t carry the same threat of bodily harm to its employees that their actual jobs do. That’s what’s so amusing about all the Sturm und Drang over the accommodations the NFL made to teams hit hard by the virus. If the safety of those who crack each other’s bones and brains for our entertainment were our primary concern, we wouldn’t need a COVID outbreak in a locker room to give us pause. We’d have banned football long ago.

But nobody wants that, not really. Football is too much fun. There’s too much money to be spent and made. And most relevant of all, there’s the perception of control. You don’t like football? Don’t watch it. You think it’s too dangerous? Don’t play it. You’re concerned about its long-term effects on my cognitive ability? That’s nice. I’ll worry about that later. The team needs me to blow up the middle linebacker with a crushing block on third-and-1.

COVID shatters that veneer of control. If the last 21 months have done nothing else, they have shown that the virus doesn’t give a damn about your politics, the part of the country in which you live, or in many cases the measures that your city, your community, or you as an individual have adopted to defend against it. So much of this situation is out of our hands, and instead of recognizing that truth and trying to get on with our lives as best as we can, we gnash our teeth and implement Kabuki-theater-style mitigation efforts and assign blame where blame doesn’t necessarily belong.

Consider again this latest and most obvious example: the Eagles-Washington game. Far be it from me to take up for a franchise owned and operated by Daniel Snyder, but here, it seems a little too convenient to paint Washington as the villain and the Eagles as the emblem of pandemic righteousness. If, as the evidence suggests, the spark that ignited the Washington outbreak was Montez Sweat’s positive test earlier this month, then the primary difference between the two teams is that one happened to have an important player who refused to get vaccinated and the other did not.

“I probably won’t get vaccinated until I get more facts and that stuff,” Sweat told reporters in June. “I’m not a fan of it at all.”

No NFL team can cut or suspend a player merely for not being vaccinated. The NFL Players Association — that group purportedly devoted to protecting the health of its members — won’t allow it. The Buccaneers’ Antonio Brown was suspended for lying to his team about being vaccinated, and Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was fined for lying to the media (and, in turn, the public) about being vaccinated, though the Packers themselves knew he wasn’t. Washington couldn’t simply kick Sweat out the door for creating the conditions that might have sidelined so many of his teammates. And even if any of those teams could suspend or release any of those players just because he hadn’t rolled up his sleeve and taken his medicine, would they? Really?

Sweat is one of the NFL’s best pass-rushing defensive ends. He had seven sacks as a rookie in 2019, had nine sacks last season, and has four in eight games this season. Rodgers is one of the 10 best quarterbacks in league history. Brown is about as gifted and productive a receiver as has ever played. Ask any NFL owner, any NFL general manager, any NFL coach, any fan of just about any NFL team: Who would you rather have as your quarterback? Unvaccinated Aaron Rodgers, or vaccinated anyone else?

No one should be surprised at how tolerant of COVID-related risk a team or its fans would be then. Everyone already has shown what we’re willing to put up with in the name of our Sunday fix.