The Guardian
Belichick’s exit plan and a negotiation by JJ Watt: NFL subplots to watch in 2021
Will Aaron Rodgers leave Green Bay after an MVP season? Will Bill Belichick leave New England before it gets ugly? There is no lack of substantial NFL plots in 2021. The general attitude of the NFL towards 2020 can be summed up succinctly: What pandemic? While other leagues have stopped, considered to be canceling their seasons, have entered complex bubbles or faced existential crises, the NFL has advanced, with the kind of bravado that is only granted to the biggest, worst and most watched people on the block. Some care was taken. Pre-season was out of the question. The masks’ mandates were in effect. But the main point was this: it doesn’t matter the lineup, it doesn’t matter the ridicule of the show, it doesn’t matter the health consequences, football will be played. And overall, it was a success. Covid has the potential to embarrass the league in Week 17, the last week of the season, and we still don’t know the extent of the health consequences, but for the most part the league’s wish has met: The season will be over on time. As the calendar changes from 2020 to 2021, here are some subplots to keep an eye on. Aaron Rodgers’ futureFrom now on, Rodgers probably has his name engraved on the MVP trophy. Voters love a narrative, and the Rodgers Revenge Tour is a better narrative than “Isn’t Patrick Mahomes monotonously excellent?” It’s Michael Jordan’s syndrome. (In fact, voters gave Karl Malone an MVP award during the height of Jordan. That really happened.) But it wasn’t long ago that the Packers selected Jordan Love in the first round of the draft, that Rodgers’ future was in the air , that the team obviously selected his replacement, which was just a matter of when Rodgers left. Rodgers has been fantastic this season. Your game has evolved. The improvised outside the script, the jazz artist is still there, but he married it to the rhythm of the script that defined his early years as a starter. It is a deadly combination. The power to decide your future now lies with Rodgers. He is acting on an MVP level and can guide the Packers to another Super Bowl title. Green Bay will want to keep the 38-year-old close by until he really starts to decline. But will Rodgers solve the problem with his own hands this off-season? How upset was he really about the selection of love? With possible quarterback premieres in places like New England, Los Angeles and San Francisco, could Rodgers try to push his way out of the title city as the final act of this year’s tour? A franchise sale The NFL as a whole did a decent job of inoculating itself with the financial losses that hit most sports leagues during the pandemic. Instead of pushing games or adding weeks, the NFL stripped off its pre-season and pushed forward whenever there was a sign of fear of health. We are playing American football! Who is ready to play? Who’s watching? We will play them on Monday and Tuesday nights and on Wednesday and Saturday morning afternoons, the quality of the games or the health of the players being screwed. That was a profitable strategy for the league, as far as any league is making money in the Covid era. But the league is still made up of old-school owners who earned most of their money in the traditional way. Although several owners stopped the financial blow to their sports institution, many had significant losses in their non-sports ventures. You just need to look at the NBA to see how even the sport that understands technology and calls itself “smart” owners have been hit by the pandemic: Tilman Fertitta, the latest NBA owner, who paid a record $ 2, 2 billion for the Houston Rockets franchise in 2017, earns its money in casinos and restaurants. His operation was reduced to 4% during the pandemic and he was forced to go public with his company, in addition to accepting an operating loan from the league. There are similar issues in the upper chamber of the NFL. Some homeowners are feeling the financial costs much more than others, especially those whose wealth is based on owning an NFL franchise. (The NFL remains the sports league with the largest number of ‘legacy’ owner families.) No one is going to shed a tear for the fattest cat, but the NFL franchises are notoriously difficult to take from owners because they print money. The pandemic changed that. The year 2021 could usher in a flock of new owners, as current owners most severely affected by the pandemic try to recover funds. Will there be a buyer of Cam Newton? Newton’s New England year plan was clear: to put himself in the sport’s most intelligent, creative and consistent organization; to show that he still had enough energy, that he just needed a break; and then sign a mega-contract the next off-season, whether it’s renewing with New England or elsewhere. But as much as Bill Belichick tried to sell the Patriots-Cam Newton experience to the media and fans this season as a success, it didn’t work. The Patriots’ offensive team was creative and forward, bypassing Newton’s idiosyncrasies and lack of precision. But very often, when Newton stepped back and tried to play with some kind of rhythm, it looked like he was trying to throw a medicine ball. Newton’s health is the issue here. He no longer has the same type of zipper on his fastball, and his shooting accuracy that was so, even during the best of times, has now fallen completely off a cliff. Perhaps the Patriots will talk to Newton for another season as a bridge to whatever the future of the team’s quarterback may be. Maybe they’ll tell themselves that he looked long before Covid’s diagnosis. Perhaps Belichick believes that Newton, despite his faults, will be fine as soon as the Patriots are able to bring back the pieces of their squad that they lost this season due to COVID. But that seems unlikely. It seems that Newton, the great pioneer, the paradigm transformer, ended up being hit. And if Belichick is not willing to enter another season, will another team do so? And if not, what does Newton do? Retire? Sit another year and wait to heal? It’s hard to imagine Newton doing the rounds like a gunslinger hired for a year on a tank-ready reconstruction team. Is that it for Bill Belichick? It doesn’t look like Belichick is slowing down. But at some point, Belichick will step away from the Patriots’ work. Belichick tried to roll things over for another push this season, helping to put together a list that was losing the core of its defense due to Covid’s defections and that lacked a defender due to Tom Brady’s move to Florida. Is Belichick, in his advanced age, post-Covid, ready and willing after an even year to start another reconstruction? He has no quarterback, and the backbone of the squad that delivered the last Super Bowl is starting to crumble – most have already left or are expected to leave this off-season. More: Belichick’s team is expected to be separated again during the off-season, both on the technical side and in the Patriots office. Is it possible that he chooses to leave before things get ugly? The Justin Fields wave. The Jaguars ended the number one choice in the next draft. The selection is expected to be Trevor Lawrence, Clemson’s prospect of a single quarterback. But, as always on a draft cycle, expect there to be a race at Justin Fields, the Ohio state quarterback who would be the best foolproof selection in a traditional year. And if former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer takes the honcho lead in Jacksonville, watch out. The conversation will increase. Leaks will flow. Commercial offers will arrive. Lawrence should be the first choice, but there is a chance that Jacksonville will switch places with the Jets (for significant transportation). JJ Watt tradeJJ Watt and the Houston Texans are synonymous with each other. But if Houston is looking to generate some sort of asset to improve its squad this off-season, moving Watt is one of the only ways. Texans have little or no summons and have one of the worst capitalization sheets in the league. They also have a confusing list that is the walking personification of the fractured office that has overseen its construction for the past five seasons. However, there, in the middle of it all, is Deshaun Watson, one of the most talented quarterbacks in the league. Having a great quarterback corrects a lot. Therefore, for Texans to return to containment, even with the gaps in the roster and the lack of flexibility in the market, it could take just five to six smart moves. One way to open up some kind of flexibility, to increase the margin of error when trying to make such moves, would be to change Watt while it still holds value. It would be a difficult change financially and culturally, but it would also be an experienced one. And it would allow Watt to have a chance with a different organization, where he could have a chance in the next 24 months to advance beyond the divisional round. New TV deals As noted in the article on the Guardian’s bold predictions for 2021, the current round of NFL TV rights deals is set to expire in 2022. As sports remain the only place where networks can invest to produce a large live audience, and as the NFL continues to reign supreme as the largest provider of live content (eight of the ten most watched broadcasts in the 2020s were football games or post-games), bidding is expected to be intense Yeah man. traditional transmission partners. Or it could hand over a more favorable deal to ESPN / Disney, with the possibility that Disney will win a coveted Super Bowl for itself and transfer its broadcasts to ABC. Or it could offer larger packages to a streaming client, like Amazon Prime, in the hope of staying ahead of the live sports streaming curve or trying to make up for some of the revenue the league and its owners lost in 2020.