Tim Benz: Like the idea of Tuesday night NFL games? Good. You'll see them again. - TribLIVE

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42 minutes ago

“Are you ready for some football?? A Tuesday night party??”

The Buffalo Bills and Tennessee Titans are.

I think.

Hank Williams Jr. should get back in the studio to re-record the old “Monday Night Football” open. Because thanks to a covid-19 scheduling backlog, I don’t think this evening’s game will be the last Tuesday night contest you’ll see.

This year or in the future.

If the ratings are good, the NFL will make it happen again in 2021. This time on purpose.

And, unless the league is willing to institute a Week 18 buffer before the playoffs, they may need to use some remaining Tuesday dates as options to squeeze in rescheduled games. It could be the only way to hopscotch through coronavirus-related interruptions to the schedule.

Actually, if the league is really smart, it may just want to put in a full bye at Week 14 (starting Thursday, Dec. 10 after all clubs have completed their originally scheduled bye weeks) instead of Week 18.

Use Week 14 as a holding station for games that can’t be rescheduled. Hope that you can get through the last three weeks without any further postponements, and, that way, the top two teams in the conference won’t have to worry about two straight off weeks.

Yes, that would push the Super Bowl back a week. Better to do it now, though, than doing it in scramble-mode a month before the game.

Otherwise, I’m not sure how much longer the NFL can continue reshuffling the schedule to keep this season going without forfeits.

The biggest issue the NFL needs to reconcile is figuring out how much its own testing is worth. After all, commissioner Roger Goodell is spending a reported $75 million on its nonstop coronavirus testing blitz. We’re talking an estimated 120 tests per team per day.

Bravo. It’s worthwhile to catch the positive cases.

But what about the dozens of negative tests per team the NFL is essentially ignoring after one or two positive tests trickle in?

The Titans are the lone team to have a true coronavirus outbreak. The Patriots have had a few cases. Their facility has been shut down, and they’ve been part of rescheduled games. The Chiefs had a player and a strength coach get flagged. The Chicago Bears shutdown for a while after a player was infeted. The Jets and Cardinals almost had a game rescheduled because of one false positive in New York.

That’s insanity.

We’re talking about a global pandemic. The league — and the world — is allegedly reacting the way that they are because this virus is easily transmittable. Hence, you can take a lot of precautions and still get infected anyway.

So, to play and practice a contact sport like football, you are inherently flouting the logic of the best way to avoid this disease, right?

Social distancing? Masks and sanitizing between plays? Forget all that. The NFL has decided to play.

Great. Then … play.

Play through it. Use the expanded practice squads. Play with players who have tested negative.

That’s what the college game is doing. So long as teams can field a team. In September, Virginia Tech won an ACC game despite missing 23 players due to coronavirus positive tests and contact tracing.

Or, if that’s too risky, fine. Shut down.

Otherwise, you are just going through a few more weeks of risk in October and November, while minimizing the chance of getting to the Super Bowl in February.

Here’s the critical issue. At some point, the NFL has to ask itself, if Joe Blow linebacker tests negative, what does that really mean?

Is Joe Blow linebacker really viewed as being negative? Or — if he has been exposed to a lone infected teammate — is Joe Blow linebacker actually viewed as being “not positive … yet.”

Because of the disease’s incubation period, there appears to be an assumption of infection for the whole team. That’s how the NFL is acting. Negative means nothing more than “not positive … yet” if there has been one positive on your roster.

That’s safe. An abundance of caution. Sure.

It’s also an impossible standard to maintain in a sport like this for six months.

Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has alluded to this school of thought as a “one fail, all fail mentality.” In other words, “If one of us gets lazy on protocols and tests positive, then we all go down as a result.”

That’s a great way for Tomlin to encourage safety. But it’s not how the NFL should govern.

If one positive test out of two full rosters — like Arizona versus New York — is that low of a threshold to nearly trigger rescheduling, quit now.

Why bother? Because, frankly, I think the league has defied the odds to be this close to virus-free so far given the close contact nature of the sport.

Most notably, I’m thrilled at the lack of contact-traced positives between infected teams (such as the Titans in Week 3) and the non-infected opponents (such as the Vikings in Week 3).

I am “ready for some football.” I have been since March. I’ll take it on any night it is available. Just keep making it available. Or take it away from me now.

Getting invested in a season, then seeing it melt away because the NFL couldn’t make the schedule work, would be worse than never having seen it begin at all.

Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via Twitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.

Categories: Sports | Steelers/NFL | Breakfast With Benz