Here’s the plan if the NFL season gets delayed due to Coronavirus

The NFL Schedule should be coming out next week, and it looks like the league is planning on some contingencies in the event the season is delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

While all major sports are currently shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, the NFL has the benefit of time on its side. The shutdown happened in the middle of the NFL’s offseason, which has allowed the league to proceed with events like free agency and the draft in a remote fashion.

The next major event on the NFL’s calendar is the release of its 2020 schedule, which could come as soon as next week. The league has been closely watching the struggles that Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL are having with restarting their seasons, leading to some contingency plans being put in place.

What could some of those plans look like? Here are some key takeaways from an analysis by Sports Business Daily.

The NFL season could start up to six weeks late

If the NFL can’t start their season on time, the league has floated scenarios where it could begin in mid-October. This would result in the Super Bowl, currently scheduled for Feb. 7 in Tampa Bay, to go back as late as Feb. 28. How would the NFL make up the lost weeks?

Bye weeks could be eliminated for the 2020 NFL season

When the schedule is released it should look like a normal one, complete with 16 games over 17 weeks. The NFL is reportedly looking into options where teams that play each other share a common bye week, allowing the league to eliminate the byes unilaterally if necessary.

Early weeks of the schedule could be tacked onto the end of the regular season

This proposal would basically mirror what happened in 2001 when Week 2 of the season was postponed after the 9/11 attacks. Those games were pushed back to become the new Week 17, and something similar could happen here to ensure the NFL can preserve as many full weeks of football as possible.

The Pro Bowl could be canceled for the 2020 season

One way to make up a lost week would be to eliminate the bye week between the Conference Championship games and the Super Bowl, which was also a tactic that was used in the 2001 season. This would cause the league to eliminate the Pro Bowl, which is played on that middle Sunday, for the 2020 season.

Expect other creative NFL scheduling measures

The NFL wants to maintain as close to a normal schedule as possible, so it could create additional mechanisms to maintain options. Don’t be shocked if we see a week of strictly divisional games early in the season which would give the NFL options to play games in different venues if certain parts of the country are in different stages of openness due to coronavirus concerns.

Once the full schedule is released expect to hear plenty of talk from NFL officials about flexibility and options. The league can tout marquee matchups and hope for fans to be able to attend at some point, but the possibility exists that games could be played without fans or pushed back indefinitely. Flexibility is key with planning anything these days, and expect to see plenty of that concept when the NFL schedule is released.