Mango

I think there is a lot of nuance here and you are painting with a broad brush. I think the picture you are painting is more akin to Andre Agassi, which is consider an outlier. But as you get better at sport, whatever it may be, it’s no longer about the game but the pursuit of excellence. You learn to get through the year for a single opportunity at greatness, and the goal isn’t having fun, it’s being the best. I have a friend who came out of f retirement to try and win her 3rd Olympic gold. When asked why she said “because I want to prove I am the best in the world” it wasn’t “because I love rowing” You mentioned Tom Brady. He doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder because of his love of the game, he has a chip because he wasn’t to be the greatest. I owe my life to the sport of rowing. It allowed me to live at the Olympic training center for a number of years. But training isn’t fun. Hell, racing isn’t all that fun. It’s a huge ball of nerves for the terrible things you’re about to will your body to do. Matthew Pinsent, 4x olympic good medalist in 4 straight Olympics threw up at every single starting line of an Olympic final. Steve Redgrave, 5 Olympics, 5 straight gold medals said after his 3rd or 4th, if you see me in a boat again, you have permission to shoot me. People like that may have lost their juvenile “love of the game” but gained a much deeper respect, understanding, and love for sport as a whole. If you were to have a larger conversation other than “do you love football” you would find that these guys have a drive and need to compete inside of them that you cannot possibly empathize with. EDIT/ADD ON: there was a point when my physiology was really great. On my irregular cross train days I was getting pretty close to training numbers for the triathlon team. I considered when my rowing career was over heading to Colorado Springs to train sport specific. I didn’t love triathlons, but I was passionate about greatness.

Let’s say Herbert is a home run, they don’t have a heavy QB contract for 5 years. Lines up perfect.

You would probably need regional bubbles just because of the enormity of the league. Finding housing for 3000 of the largest people on the planet would be difficult. Without fans, you just need stadiums/fields with enough quality and ability to set up network cameras. With it looking like college football is delaying the inevitable, you probably find a center big time football. It would look something like this: OKC Base- Houston, Dallas, New Orleans and Denver (access to Dallas, OSU, OU) Columbus, OH- Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinatti, (OSU, Ohio U, Miami Ohio) Florida teams- Just set them on fire Madison WI- Vikings, Bears, Lions, Packers I don't know, I am just spit balling, but something like that. If you wanted to take it a step further, treat it like the world cups. Internal round robin to start. Re-organize the bubbles, test, rinse and repeat.

I agree. I am unsure in what I would expect from enforcement. Part of the issue in Saratoga Springs is that all public officials make 14k per year. So only the elite can run for office. For perspective, Saratoga county is the 5th or 6th wealthiest county in the state. Basically the wealthiest that isn’t in or bordering NYC. So getting people in their “spare time” to help police their community is probably a very slim possibility. This all started when a young woman in my neighborhood posted on FB that she was racially profiled by the police. The commissioner went on FB and basically said if she wanted to complain some more she would pull all officers from the neighborhood and tell dispatch to stop responding to any calls in the area. That sounds pretty much triggered me. People can disagree with all sorts of things, but that is 100% not OK by a public official. My mom used to be a campaign manager in Buffalo, my sister worked on Capitol Hill, I used to work with CAO’s in Buffalo, this isn’t new for me. If she hadn’t don’t that, I’d probably be your regular citizen posting memes, attending rally’s, and standard emails to public officials with opinions.

Yes sir. They keep saying that the state EO and amendment to NYS health code don’t actually given them any teeth to enforce anything for the general public. Which is true...if you operate under the assumption that municipalities can’t pass their own legislation. But that assumption would be false. I have actually been chasing down our Commissioner of Public Safety on this. Not necessarily that we should have any sort of penal code, but at the very least take a stance so we can begin the conversation about whether we should or not. She’s gone to the point of posting on FB (now deleted) that it was proposed at a city council meeting and shot down. It wasn’t proposed, I shared the video of said meeting on the city page. That was later removed...until I reminded them that that is illegal, and it was put back up. Local politics up here are a disaster. Long and short, city won’t enforce a mask mandate because they don’t want to take police away from other duties. Which is a fine opinion (that I disagree with) but we can’t broach that until they give reason to why nothing is passing. Most recently I submitted a FOIA request for all communication among city officials about mask enforcement. We will see how that turns out. I imagine they push back for an appeal. About 6 hours after I submitted it they started scrubbing their social media.

You should come to Saratoga. Numbers aren't huge, nor will they be given the size of the population. But the population has seen about 35 cases this week, bring our total to about 650. That is more of the eye opener, 5% of cases came in the last 7 days, and we just started track season. Granted the track is closed for spectators but every bar is packed at the moment with racing on TV's. It will most likely sky rocket soon up here without any local mandate/legislation. The Public Safety Commissioner keeps saying we "can't" enact any mask mandate, meanwhile we can, they just choose not to. Whether a mask mandate is popular or not can't even being addressed because the mayor and commissioner keep lying about whether they can or not. Everybody takes them at their word. The lack of major newspaper to publicly fact check them is infuriating.

I mean, his attorney made a point of saying EO’s blood work came back greater than 0.000. Attorneys are dumb, I would guess via bloodwork it revealed something like 0.0004. Which mean he had a beer like 9 hours earlier.

Basically stays the same name, the "new" ERA co. field. Pegula playing 6D Rummikub with this one.

So I guess we’ll just put an end to the board? Or maybe just @MJS and @Mr. WEO can just agree that neither will post again regarding football or fracking? ?

Oh, cool, fun game. I wanna play. I guess it doesn't make sense for a Joe Schmo to be criticizing an elite athlete or NFL head coach on their athletic prowess or decision making practices... See what I did there.

I think if the NFL gets anywhere near 5% in the first two weeks they are in for a world of hurt. No amount of testing will slow that rate down and it is probably too late. Incubation is somewhere between 5 and 14 days, and the NFL opens with zero cases and on the 14th day they have 4.5% positive cases (130 positive cases or 4 per team), it is probably already working through the a ton more. That would be a total failure.

That is terrifying.

No, there are dozens of sources reporting it. I just know some here are not particularly "fond" of CNN, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, NYT.

Adding on here, calling the dip in cases due to immunity is largely false. In a 60k+ person study in Spain, they estimate that only abut 5% of the population has antibodies. Some higher density areas like Madrid are around 10%, while coastal cities fall around 3%. Heard immunity would result in larger casualties than we are seeing now. (purposely linking fox news before somebody yells fake news) https://www.foxnews.com/science/covid-19-antibody-study-spain-warns-herd-immunity-cannot-be-achieved-without-devastating-effects

It sounds like a lot of players are talking about not showing up until there are some answers. Just a pre-emptive voice before an official NFLPA stance. At this point I do not see how the season starts on time and runs in full. It seems to make the most sense to delay the start of the season.

This isn’t comparable to most of our situations. 95% of us are pushing product in some way. Whether it’s sales, writing code, cooking food, working at 7 11,we are just part of the supply chain in some way. NFL players ARE the product, so thoughts on “choosing” to work is drastically different than most of our experiences.

That assumes things like spiral and angle of release are constant.

Right, I get that. But I think it they try and start the season and make the 53 man roster, teams will still be on the hook for roster bonuses and work out bonuses. Different than performance. I get what the NFL will try and do regarding performance bonuses. I’m not an attorney, just a dude with an opinion on the internet, but I’d guess if it went to court performance bonuses will end up prorated.

I did the same thing, picked 6. I am pretty sure the OP’s edit was that you were capped at 5. It’s not in the meme and wasn’t originally in the title/post.

I quoted the wrong post from you. I meant to refer to your post about it not effecting elite athletes much. That’s false. If the Olympics were held this summer, Emily would most likely not make the team let alone win. That’s a gigantic effect it’s been months and multiple members of team USA have not been able to perform to standard. But sure they’re not in the ICU....

That’s Losman. Flutie never played with those jerseys. Their first year was 2003 Flutie left in 2000. You should get an extra dollar for picking JP.

You must have missed my PSA in another post from fellow teammate Buffalo native, 4x world champ, world record holder, and olympic gold medalist. Where she hasn’t been back to fork year from February/March (this post was from JULY) and she has teammates with similar or resumes who are doing much worse in terms of measurable performance. Sure their elite status might keep them out of an ICU, but it may likely cost them their career. Forgive me for being blunt (or don’t, I don’t care) but get your trash opinion about the effects on elite athletes vs. the general population off of the internet where others might confuse them as facts, and keep them to yourself until there is literally any shred of evidence as to what you are saying is true. Reposting: My COVID experience: This is going to be a long post, but I've seen so many people talking about how the age of people infected with COVID has trended downward and that means we're fine. So I thought it was a good time to share my experience with the virus so that people connected to me could read a 1st hand account of the impact of a mild/moderate case of COVID on a young, healthy, fit individual. In case you don't know me, I am an elite athlete, a 4 time world champion in rowing and I won a gold medal at the 2016 Olympic games. I'm currently training for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in 2021 now. Back in March everything was changing so rapidly. The virus started spreading in the Northeast US where our team was training for the Olympics. It was an incredibly stressful time and we were entering our last 2 month stretch of selection. Everything started getting canceled, my dad found out he was going to need surgery and radiation to remover cancer from his face, and officials were insisting that the Olympics would definitely go on as planned. We were told that the Olympics don't get canceled (turns out they can be postponed though). Our team continued to train following the local guidelines as they rapidly changed throughout March. I was definitely concerned about the virus and what we were hearing was happening in Italy and other countries, however I considered myself and my teammates low risk individuals. I couldn't tell you the last time I was at a bar or another crowded place. Everything I do, especially in the Olympic year is all about recovery and being in the best position I can possibly be in to make the team. So my social circle is really small, almost completely limited to my team and USRowing employees. NJ issued a stay at home order on March 21st. Our entire team took ergs and weight lifting equipment home with us and I started training on my porch. 2 days later we received an email that a USRowing employee that most of our team was in close contact with tested positive for COVID. We were instructed to quarantine for 2 weeks following our last interaction with that employee. I had worked with the employee who at the time was not showing any symptoms 3 days earlier. I started my quarantine and was so thankful that I had done a massive grocery haul a day earlier. One by one my teammates (ages 23-37) started showing symptoms of the virus. I didn't think I was having any symptoms, but I did notice that I was having a hard time breathing when the intensity of my workouts started increasing and that I was starting to sleep close to 12 hours a night, but I didn't have a fever. So, at the time I attributed the difficulty breathing to erging outside in the cold and the extra sleep to the fact that the Olympics had just been postponed and my entire focus for the last four years was no longer close to 100 days away. As most of my teammates started to recover from their acute COVID symptoms, I started noticing a fever on April 1st. That was Day 12 of my quarantine. Our team doctor told us to look out for anything over 99.0 because their practice had seen people testing positive with fevers as low as 99.0. On the night of Day 12 I had a baby fever of 99.2, so I texted our team Dr. to let him know. I genuinely thought it was unlikely that I had COVID because typically people were showing symptoms days 4-5 after exposure. So I thought that the elevated temperature was probably just a fluke. The next morning I woke up, I felt great, and I never had a fever that entire day. Friday April 3rd was a completely different story. I slept over 12 hours that night and when I woke up it was painful to breathe and my entire body ached like I had done something really wrong while I was practicing the day before. That day my fever ranged from about 100.4-101.7. I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without needing to sit down and take a nap. Not only did I sleep for 12 hours that night, but I also took a 3 hour nap. I was too weak to make myself food that entire day until I forced myself to make pancakes that night because I knew I had to eat something. The next night I slept for 12 hours again. It was still painful to breath and I was still extremely exhausted and unable to do simple household tasks. Thankfully, though, my body aches were gone that day. These were the 2 days where I had the worst symptoms, but just because these symptoms improved after 2 days doesn't mean I was fully recovered from COVID. It took the rest of April for me to be able to train normally again. I took 4 days off from training while I was sick and in hindsight I wish I had given myself the freedom to take more days off if I needed them. When I first started trying to work out again I tried doing a 30 minute jog. My heart rate was really high and I felt like I was running through water. The jog was meant to be light and a small attempt to get my body moving again, but it was so difficult I had to stop after 20 minutes. I am used to doing workouts that range from 80-120 minutes. I don't give up easily and I was just near my peak closing in on final selection for the Olympics. Now I couldn't even jog/walk for 30 minutes. The next day I tried an easy erg. The best way I can describe what I was feeling is when you crash and burn on a workout because you didn't fuel your body properly. My legs felt fine, but I felt physically faint and shaky and not ready to do the workout. I completed the workout by taking one stroke at a time and allowing myself to be as slow as I needed to be. The entire month of April was a big struggle for me to workout. Things improved to where I was able to workout consistently, but I had to go 10-15 splits slower that I normally would on easy workouts to control my heart rate and make it through workouts. And for reference, 10-15 splits is a ton, that basically meant I was erging at a pace of an average high school girl. I still didn't feel like myself and always felt like I was carrying 50 extra pounds when I was working out. Things didn't really improve until I went for a run the morning of May 2nd. All of a sudden I felt light and like I was in my own body again. It felt like a complete 180. While I felt normal in my body again, it has been a long journey to get back into shape. As of today, over 3 months after my symptoms went away, I am working on getting back into the shape I was in in early February and March before all of the setbacks. While it only ? took me a month to feel like I was in my own body again, I have teammates who were dealing with complications from COVID for over 2 months. So if you don't think the virus is that big of a deal because you are young, healthy, or fit, please consider my story. My guess is that my teammates and I are at a minimum healthier and fitter than most of you and it knocked many of us down hard. I have personally never experienced any other illness like this. I have never been knocked off of my feet for an entire month before. Please wear a mask to protect yourself and the people around you. I am hoping to donate blood plasma to help a person in need. We're all in this together and the more we can do small things the sooner our lives can get back to something resembling normal again.

I could Be wrong here, but regardless of TV contracts, if they try and start the season and get a few weeks in, they’ll still be on the hook for roster bonuses, work out bonuses etc. That part of the contract is independent of TV revenue. A ton of players will get their bonuses. The NFL will probably push to have performance bonuses extrapolated.

My biggest issue with this is the NFL hasn’t reported any league wide testing outside of orgs and players making it public. (Obviously HIPPA exists) It is half way through July and they haven’t reported any COVID cases as per of any league mandate. Why would I suddenly trust them to honestly report it come September, October, etc. say we make it to January, are they reporting it then? We are weeks away from training camp. Leagues trying to start up are reporting regularly, but not the NFL. Proportionately they should be at about 90 cases and crickets.