The NFL regular season doesn’t start for a while yet, but if we were operating on a normal timeline, rookie minicamps would be taking place this month. We’d be getting our first look at Jalens Reagor and Hurts in midnight green.

Peter King over at NBC Sports has some interesting tidbits on what a COVID-19 affected NFL season might look like, in his Football Morning in America column. 

Writes King:

Talking to smart people in and close to the league in the past few days, I got the impression the idea of an imperfect season is on the minds of many.

“At some point,” one top club executive said, “we’re going to have start accepting inequalities. What happens when teams in four states are told, ‘You can’t have training camp?’ Do those teams not have camp? Do they travel to a state that allows a gathering of 100 or so people to work? Time will tell, but the way it looks now, there’s no way all states are going to be under equal rules by the summer.”

This concept is interesting.

The NBA wanted to do something like this, where, for example, teams in regions without a lot of COVID cases could reopen their practice facilities on a limited basis. That would work for the Utah Jazz, perhaps, but the Sixers and Knicks and teams in heavily-populated areas would have a hard time making that work.

More from King:

I could see the NFL, if and when fans are allowed to come to games, advising anyone over 70 to not come. I could see alcohol being banned at games for the year. (Meaning, theoretically, fewer trips to crowded rest rooms through crowded concourses by patrons.) With three teams in California, and Gov. Gavin Newsom having a hair-trigger about anything that draws a crowd, the NFL may have to determine if it’s willing to play games with fans in Tampa Bay, and games with no fans in California, for most of all of the season.

Intriguing to me, this concept is (Yoda voice). We should all view college football as a blueprint for this, since SEC football is MASSIVE down south and the powers that be in the Bible Belt with do anything possible to make sure fall Saturdays remain a thing in 2020. You’re going to have governors in red states move to lift restrictions much more quickly than Governor Murphy, for instance, up here in New Jersey. It’s one thing for the NFL to have a plan, but you have 50 different states with 50 different sets of guidelines, and that affects how each individual sports franchise can operate.

It brings about the question of fairness, more than anything. How fair is it for the Jaguars to play in front 50,000 home fans, while the Jets are at a neutral field, or playing in an empty stadium somewhere? The entire season is going to require one large asterisk.

King:

I was on a call with reporters in April with the National Football League Players Association’s medical director, Thom Mayer, who was surveying the cloudy landscape. “We’ll go anywhere the science takes us and nowhere the science doesn’t,” Mayer said. “We’re going to look at everything as long as it keeps all 2,500 players safe.” I doubt you’d see any players say they were refusing to play. But if a team, for example, gets four or five positive tests of players, coaches or staff close together, would the league shut down that team and cancel its next game or two?

Let’s hope not. One relapse or flare up and we’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we?

King’s full column is worth a read.