And so it begins

 

Training camp is over. The not-so final active Browns roster is set. Or is it? That means the regular season has come clearly into focus. Game plans for the season opener Sunday in Baltimore are being implemented this week.

 

Yes, it’s really going to happen. The National Football League is actually going to play the 2020 season in the face of a global pandemic. It will truly be a journey into the vast unknown.

 

Six months after this pandemic shut down a nation and threatened to change the life we had grown accustomed to, and doubts lingered that it would be accomplished, the NFL is launching its 101^st consecutive season.

 

Nothing has prevented the league from functioning since its founding in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, which became the National Football League two years later. Not a world war, not natural disasters, not an epidemic. Nothing. It can now add pandemic to that list.

 

There is no question this will be a season that won’t soon – probably ever – be forgotten because of its unusual nature. It will be a 17-week, 256-game regular-season grind that culminates five playoff weeks later with Super Bowl LV (55) in Tampa next Feb. 7

 

It will be 22 weeks fraught with peril on a weekly basis against an enemy that cannot be seen unless it’s under a microscope. It is an enemy that can strike at any time without warning.

 

Yes we’re talking a simple game of professional football here. So why the big deal? Because COVID-19 is a killer that can spread in any number of ways. Close contact is one of the main transmission avenues. And football is the ultimate close contact sport.

 

At the risk of being repetitious, football is really not a contact sport. Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport. The fact the NFL has escaped anything remotely considered an outbreak to this point in training camps is a minor miracle.

 

The fear of playing under such condition scares the hell out of a lot of players, causing 66 of them (five with the Browns) to say, “Nope, not this year,” and opt out of this season.

 

The league is determined to beat the odds. Commissioner Roger Goodell said as much when Peter King of NBC Sports asked him if he was confident the season would be played to its conclusion.

 

“I am,” he told King in his Football Morning in America column in ProFootballlTalk. “But I will tell you this: We’re never going to get comfortable. If confident means we’re comfortable, then that’s not where we are. . . .  We all have to do our part here to be successful in completing our season. I think we have a plan to get us there.”

 

In essence – and with fingers crossed – the NFL is flipping the bird at this country’s most dangerous health enemy in a century.

 

It all begins Thursday night in Kansas City with the Super Bowl champion Chiefs welcoming the Houston Texans. The only nod to the coronavirus? The game will be played in front of around 16,000 fans and, of course, a national television audience.

 

Small crowds will be a common sight throughout the season as the NFL pays special attention to the stringent protocols being set down. In many cases, stadiums will be empty at game time.

 

The Browns and Cincinnati Bengals have received permission from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to allow up to 6,000 fans for two of their home games, including the Browns’ home opener against the Bengals in a nationally televised game on Thursday night in week two.

So here we are with 22 weeks of the NFL gambling it won’t be conquered by the unforeseen, the sudden dangers and the always-present challenge of not completing what more than a few believed was an improbability.