Sighs of relief as the NFL ‘avoid the asterisk’

The Super Bowl went off as planned to end an NFL season that no one could have prepared for, writes Ben Burrows

A general view of Raymond James Stadium (Getty Images)

The season that many thought would never start is over. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are Super Bowl champions and the 2020 NFL season, a season like none before it, is at an end.

As the confetti rained down on Tom Brady and his teammates, as the celebrations began, it was only natural to look back on just how close we came to not getting to this point at all.

That the NFL did, against mounting odds with plenty of ups and downs along the way, is a testament to the efforts of all who were part of it.

"This was an extraordinary collective effort," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said last week. "There's so many people that had to work together to get this done. There were doubters, people that didn't believe we could do it, we had a lot of unknowns ourselves.

"We believed that staying on schedule and working to try to get 256 games done as we try to say, 'avoid the asterisk,' I think we were able to do that."

The doubters Goodell spoke of had good reason to be skeptical.

Even with the luxury of watching and learning from other sports - and watching and learning from the mistakes made - the idea of pulling off a full season of full-contact sporting competition in the teeth of a pandemic would've been deemed far fetched at best when the plans were first drawn up all those months ago.

And not only did they do that, but they did it with a season of the highest quality - with more than a million fans in attendance - capped with a Super Bowl quarterbacked by two of the greatest to ever do it.

In total, 262 players and 463 personnel tested positive during the 2020 campaign. Teams were forced to close training facilities, practices became virtual, games were moved, bye weeks were shifted. But despite unparalleled adversity the Super Bowl went ahead as planned, on the date pencilled in all the way back in September, albeit different to any before it.

Both team hotels remained empty all week in the build-up. The Chiefs didn't even fly in until Saturday while the Bucs, the first team in NFL history to play a Super Bowl on home turf, slept in their own beds.

The usual pandemonium of media day to start the week was replaced with a series of video calls, lonely players in isolated rooms staring back at their own image on a screen as they answered questions posed from around the world.

The day itself was all change too. The 66,000-capacity Raymond James stadium welcomed just 25,000 fans, 7,500 of them vaccinated medical workers, to take up their socially-distanced seats.

The job isn't done of course. Of the 2.2million estimated by the World Health Organisation to have died as a result of coronavirus, 440,000 are American. Efforts to vaccinate the population in the United States remain in their infancy. The 2021 season, some seven months away, will surely be impacted in a similar way to that of this one.

Add to that the ongoing issue of minority representation in coaching and other big picture matters and there remains plenty of work to do for the league, the NFL Players' Association and others.

"I don't know when normal will occur again or if normal will occur again," Goodell said. "I know we have learned to work in a very difficult environment, and we will do it again.

"That is one of the things we learned ... hearing clubs and the NFLPA saying our relationship has never been stronger.

"I interpret that as a trust that has been built here that will take us forward and will be the long-lasting legacy of this season."