After some wild rescheduling last season due to COVID-19, the NFL could force teams to forfeit games during the 2021 season.
The 2020 NFL season while the league tried to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic was unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Perhaps the best way to describe that is, due to postponements caused by COVID outbreaks within teams, there were regular-season games played on all seven days of the week.
It doesn’t appear the NFL is interested in having that happen again in the 2021 NFL season.
NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reported on Thursday that the league informed teams that, if a game can not be rescheduled in the upcoming season, then the team who is responsible for the COVID outbreak will be forced forfeit and take a loss on their record.
In the memo (part of the Twitter thread from Pelissero), the league states that they will not be adding a 19th week to the new 18-week season in order to accomodate any rescheduling due to COVID outbreaks. Instead, they will hand out forfeits, which could be massively important.
The NFL is taking a much stricter, harsher approach with COVID-19 in the 2021 season.
While the possibility of teams having to forfeit games was at the forefront of the new memo, there were a number of other things that are far from negligible that Pelissero mentioned in the thread breaking down what the league is saying.
If a team is forced to forfeit a game, neither team’s players that were scheduled to play in that game will receive their weekly salary. Furthermore, any team that experiences a COVID outbreak that leads to a cancelation of a game could be subject to both financial responsibility for the missed game and discipline from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
Also in the memo is a bit about the protocols for vaccinated players who test positive for COVID. Should that happen but the player remains asymptomatic, they can be cleared to play after consecutive negative tests 24 hours apart. For unvaccinated players, the 10-day period that was in place last season will remain.
Though the NFL has not required players to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, they are clearly making a push for teams to do so with rule changes such as this. For what it’s worth, the latest numbers say that 14 teams are above an 85 percent vaccination rate while all 32 clubs are over 50 percent for the team.
Suffice it to say, it seems unlikely that we’ll see anymore Wednesday afternoon NFL games as the 2021 season approaches. The bigger question, though, is what other efforts the league will make to try and further increase the vaccination rates.