Maybe this just isn't the greatest idea.
Wait, hear me out.
Today, the 29th of November, is an NFL Sunday like no other.
The Steelers and Ravens were supposed to have kicked off three days ago, then this afternoon, then this coming Tuesday, and now that's being threatened, too, by 22 total Baltimore players on the COVID-19 list, plus an ominous handful right here in our city. It was Stephon Tuitt and a couple others at first, and then yesterday it was James Conner, a cancer survivor, and Danny Smith, the 67-year-old special teams coach.
In Santa Clara County, California, government officials have halted all gatherings and all contact sports, leaving the 49ers homeless. They aren't allowed to play or practice anywhere inside county limits for at least three weeks, banished just like the Blue Jays were all summer from north of the border, just like all the other civic orders that led to sports going dark back in March.
In Denver ... my God, the Broncos are about to partake in an NFL game without an NFL quarterback.
No, for real.
Jeff Driskel tested positive Thursday, and the other three quarterbacks hadn't been wearing masks around Driskel, were caught lying about that to contact tracers, and all four of them were thus ruled ineligible to face the 8-2 Saints this afternoon. Without sympathy from the NFL, I should add, and appropriately so, as player availability isn't supposed to be weighed toward possible postponements. Only continuing spread.
And yet ... wow ... look at us.
If I come across as two-faced here, so be it. This situation's been both extraordinary and evolving. I'd love to see football. I'd love to cover football, to do my job. But every day, every hour, there's new information to process, most of it ominous to the extreme.
Oh, and hey, while I'm at it, there's the not-so-small matter of the quarter-million-plus Americans who've been killed by this thing. With a current daily pace of 2,700 that's the highest yet.
My friends, that's like a 9/11 every single day.
And if anyone dares come at me with data or theories to the contrary, I'll show you my mom currently in a Monroeville hospital fighting this damned thing. With none of us allowed to visit. With none of us able to make any meaningful difference. She's doing fine symptomatically, and we believe she'll be fine. But it's no picnic. You'd better believe it's as real as real gets.
All of this is scary. I'm not too grown-up to confess to that count. I'm also not too grown up to share a good cry with mom, as occurred the other night.
Candidly, I haven't got a point here. I won't even come close to our standard word count. This won't be much of a column.
Should the Steelers and Ravens finally meet Tuesday night, I'll be glad they did, if only because it'll mean something swung toward the better. Should the 49ers and all 32 NFL teams find a way to safely navigate these final six weeks of the regular season without putting themselves or anyone else in jeopardy, that'd be OK, too. And should the Broncos' quarterback-for-a-day somehow survive whatever New Orleans' defense has in store for the poor S.O.B. ... heck, that might actually be entertaining.
But we're in a bad, bad spot right now. All of us, not just the NFL.
And in the same breath, I'll add that we're also in the red zone for beating this thing. We're closer than ever. The first domestic delivery of vaccinations is expected to arrive in nursing homes within the next dozen days. It won't all be smooth after that, but it'll be a start, here and abroad. It'll be the beginning of the end.
Maybe, just maybe, we could wait this out a little longer.