Don’t call this NFL season a success. It was a series of close calls and near misses

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The NFL regular season ended on Sunday. It was a weird year, calling for weird superlatives.

If the league gave out an award for MIP (Most Illustrative Player), this year’s would go to Dwayne Haskins. He was the individual point where the pandemic and football collided.

Haskins was a decorated prospect coming out of Ohio State. Washington took him in the first round of the 2019 draft. It apparently did so in part because he’d been a D.C.-area celebrity at the same high school team owner Daniel Snyder’s son attends.

You want to know how things go wrong on a bad sports team? The general manager gets his team of experts around the table and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a quarterback problem,” just as the owner happens to be walking by on his way to a six-hour lunch. And the owner just can’t bring himself to keep on going down the hall. He feels a compelling need to contribute.

Anyway, along comes COVID-19. The NFL doesn’t so much decide to press on as to press right through.

Safety protocols aren’t all that safe? No problem. We’ll figure that out on the fly.

Coaches won’t wear the masks on TV? No problem. We’ll fine them so hard they’ll all be thinking twice about that pool. On the yacht.

Players testing positive all over the place, all of the time? No problem. We’ll just postpone a few games. A few more. A feeeeew more. Did that work? It didn’t? No problem.

The NFL’s COVID-19 solution amounted to, “What COVID?” You wouldn’t call the regular season that ended Sunday a success. You’d call it a steady series of close calls and near misses made possible by a Herculean amount of apathy.

Turns out, if you work really, really hard at ignoring something scary, you can accomplish amazing end-of-fiscal results. Remember that, kids.

But along the way, somebody had to be thrown out of the moving car in order to put the scolds of the internet off the scent. Haskins was that guy.

Given a chance to start in Washington, he wasn’t all that hot. Turns out ‘high-school heartthrob’ isn’t a compelling entry on a football player’s CV. That was his first mistake.

Haskins’s second mistake was sneaking around COVID-19 protocols and checking a “family friend’ into the team hotel. I feel fairly comfortable in guessing that that friend was not his great aunt.

Haskins’s third mistake was failing to understand that his first two mistakes made him expendable.

His fourth mistake was not in attending a birthday party that included a bunch of unmasked strippers – more friends! It wasn’t taking pictures with said unmasked strippers at the birthday party. The fourth mistake was failing to appreciate that when you invite a bunch of hangers-on to quite literally hang on to you, one of them is going to put the pictures of this hanger-on’ing on the internet.

Reading the blitz and navigating life as a public figure: Both require smarts, but not necessarily the same sort.

Anyway, after dangling him for a couple of days, Washington cut Haskins outright.

It is important to appreciate here that no athlete gets cut because he’s broken the rules. If you’re good enough, the rules do not apply.

Haskins was cut because he, a) wasn’t good enough, and b) made a suitable human PR sacrifice. The next time someone accuses the NFL of not caring much about the pandemic – which it plainly does not – it can point over in Haskins’s direction and say, “Oh yeah? Then explain that guy to us.”

Nearly 2,000 players participated in some way in the 2020 NFL season. At one point or another, about 160 found their way onto the COVID-19 “injury” list. But Haskins, the greatest friend you could ever have, is the only casualty among them.

Now that the season is done, the most remarkable thing you can say about it is that it happened.

It’s worth remembering now that when the NFL started up, on schedule, in July, the United States was in the teeth of a second pandemic wave worse than the first. But there was no dissent, nor any serious discussion of cancellation. The league and players pressed on in unison. They didn’t have to bother blustering about tradition, tying together the country and all that, a la baseball. The NFL just steamed ahead.

It is because of the NFL that the NBA and NHL felt justified in pulling a U-turn on their bubble philosophy. It is because of the NFL that other leagues agreed that playing – even if shortened, fanless seasons became massive money pits – was imperative. It is in large part because of the NFL that the U.S. has retained a pervading, if not convincing, sense of normalcy in the midst of the worst COVID outbreak on the planet.

All the other content in 2020 turned to ash. New TV shows seemed immediately out of date. Hollywood withered. The music was terrible. Other large events were cancelled or massively curtailed. But football endured, even the college variety.

So if the NFL accomplished anything this year, it was reasserting its primacy among America’s monolithic cultural enterprises.

Also, the Buffalo Bills got good, which is not nothing. If the Bills can be good, anything really is possible. When you begin to lose faith, and that will happen, remind yourself that the Bills will host a playoff game in a week’s time.

Yes, sure, they will almost certainly lose it. That’s the Bills Way. But they finally showed up. And showing up fully fit and ready to get the job done was something relatively few of us managed for most of this year.

The last time the Bills won a playoff game, I probably could not have told you the definition of epidemiology. I may not have even heard of the word epidemiology.

Lots of things have changed since then and continue to do so at an alarming rate in just one direction. But I choose to believe that if there’s hope for the Bills in 2021, there’s hope for us all.