The league giveth opt out rights, and then the league hoped that the number of opt outs wouldn’t taketh away the season. Although more players opted out than expected, the group of nearly 70 players to pass on playing in 2020 includes no passers.
At the most important position in the sport, not a single player opted out. That surprised some, especially in light of the reality that a strong case could be made for players with significant fully-guaranteed salaries in 2020 to press pause on their careers for a year, given the possibility that the 2020 season will be scrapped and that, based on their specific contract, they would lose millions.
But here’s the reality: The backlash from fans if a starting quarterback with guaranteed salary in 2020 had made the business decision to take a year off would have been strong and relentless. Bills cornerback Tre’Davious White took plenty of abuse from fans, and he simply was thinking about opting out. If Russell Wilson or Aaron Rodgers or Dak Prescott or Ryan Tannehill or Kirk Cousins or any other top-half-of-the-league quarterbacks on the right side of 40 had decided to take a season off, it could have gotten very ugly for those players, making it much harder for them to reconnect with the fan base and/or their teammates in 2021.
It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. Opt-out decisions should be respected in every case, but fans who have jobs that pay far less and that entail no opt-out rights don’t want to hear about millionaire athletes getting to take a year off, especially when those fans have spent the last five months looking forward to football season as a distraction from the realities of the worst pandemic in 100 years.
Surely, at least one of the quarterbacks on the NFL’s 32 depth charts have concerns about playing football in a pandemic. Not a single one opted-out. Whatever the reasons (and concern over hostile fan reaction undoubtedly was one of them), that’s very good news for the NFL.
