When it comes to contingency plans for the 2020 season, the league has them. It just prefers not to have to use them.
Via Sports Business Daily, Packers CEO Mark Murphy recently acknowledged that the ultimate contingency plan includes bumping the Super Bowl to March.
“We could move the Super Bowl back as far as four weeks,” Murphy said during a virtual pep rally prior to the game against the Buccaneers. “Obviously, we’d prefer not to do that, but you do have that flexibility if we run into a number of outbreaks with different teams or if we have to kind of move the schedule back.”
That’s still a last resort. Indeed, the league is still resisting as long as possible tacking an eighteenth week onto the regular season.
“We’d prefer not to [add a week], we’d like to play as much as possible [with] the schedule as it sits now,” Murphy said, explaining that the cancellation of the Pro Bowl makes it easy to push everything back a week and keep the Super Bowl in its current spot: Sunday, February 7.
There should be no reason to bump the Super Bowl to March 7. That would happen if the league needs five makeup weekends, or if the league ultimately decides to temporarily shut things down amid multiple outbreaks and missed games.
One way or another, the NFL will complete the season. In 1982, the league conducted a postseason and a Super Bowl despite staging only nine regular-season games per teams. Already, most teams have played six games.
The bigger challenge this year will come from ensuring that all teams play 16 games. Most fans have yet to comprehend the possibility of teams making or missing the playoffs based on playing only 14 or 15 games.