NFL Schedule will be speculative

NFL schedule will be speculative, at very best

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By STEVE KING

Virtual, hopefulness, uncertainty.

Those are the new watchwords in the new normal of our lives, including sports. That goes, too, for the NFL, even as it takes another big step forward this offseason. The NFL schedule will be speculative, at very best with it’s release on Thursday night.

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— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) May 6, 2020

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The individual teams can release their individual schedules at 7:30, and certainly will do so, for in this daily routine where nothing of substance happens anywhere in sports anymore, why in the name of crazy hype would they miss a chance to jump in with both feet as they hoot and holler? The full league schedule will be released at 8, and will be followed by what can best be described as a mass convention of talking heads talking about it – hopefully not all at the same time, but you and I both know it will happen with these opinionated, strong-willed individuals — and analyzing it upside down, right-side up and sideways.

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By the end of the night, we’ll all be bleary-eyed and our ears will ache, for we will have just experienced an information overload of schedule stuff.

It will be fun. It will give us all – not the talking heads, just the regular people – something to discuss via texts or phone calls for a few days heading into the weekend, and perhaps a little beyond, as we huddle at home, trying to slip the tackle of the coronavirus.

But we need to pump the brakes a little – or in my case, and maybe yours as well, a lot. Let me be very clear in saying that this schedule release won’t be like it has always been. It can’t. There’s no way.

Look around at your neighborhood, your town, your county – heck, take a good, long look at yourself – and what do you see? Masks, empty streets and, so sadly, crowded hospitals and overwhelmed funeral homes, all of which we are observing from the safety – hopefully – of our homes.

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With all that, then, can you imagine, even in your wildest dreams, playing football not just by early September, but by anytime when there are still leaves on trees in Northeast Ohio?

I can’t. I hope I’m wrong, for a lot of reasons, but I don’t know that I am.

We’ll see, though, down the road.

But in the interim, I just can’t take these schedules – that of the Browns or any other team — seriously, especially the first part of it.

In the past, the release of the schedules always gave definition and substance to the season. It began to bring it all into focus, crystallizing everything and making it look real, that it will actually happen at those times, dates and venues, and against those teams. It was the foundation on which everything else was built.

None of that – not one bit — will be happening this time.

Those aforementioned watchwords.

It’s only a VIRTUAL schedule in my book, as in some kind of quasi-form, a best guess, perhaps even an educated guess, an approximation.

There is HOPEFULNESS that the season could, or might, happen at some point.

But there’s enough well-founded UNCERTAINTY to make this schedule release only speculative, at very best.

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