The guardian
Belichick’s exit plan and a JJ Watt deal: NFL subplots to see in 2021
Will Aaron Rodgers leave Green Bay for an MVP caliber season? Will Bill Belichick leave New England before it gets ugly? There is no shortage of meaty NFL plot lines in 2021. The general attitude of the NFL towards 2020 can be summed up succinctly: what pandemic? While other leagues come to a standstill, being seen as ruining their seasons, entering into complicated bubbles or facing existential crises, the NFL thundered, with the kind of bravado that only the biggest and worst and most watched the block is granted. Some precautions have been taken. Pre-season was out. Mask mandates were in. But the end result was: regardless of the line-up, regardless of the ridiculousness of the spectacle, regardless of the health consequences, football will be played. And overall, it was a success. Covid may embarrass the league in week 17, the last week of the season, and we do not yet know the extent of the health consequences, but the league has mostly got its wish: the season will be completed on time . As the calendar rotates from 2020 to 2021, there are some subplots to keep an eye on. Aaron Rodgers’ future From now on, Rodgers will probably have his name on the MVP trophy. Voters love a story, and the Rodgers Revenge Tour is a better story than “is Patrick Mahomes not drunkenly excellent?” This is the Michael Jordan Syndrome. (Voters actually gave Karl Malone an MVP award during Jordan’s first run. That’s a real thing that happened.) But it’s not so long ago that the Packers selected Jordan Love in the first round of the draft. did not, that the future of Rodgers was in the air. , that the team obviously chose his replacement, that it was only a matter of when Rodgers would leave. Rodgers has been great this season. His game has evolved. The improvisational jazz artist is still there, but he is married to the rhythm on the script that defines his early years as an appetizer. It’s a deadly combination. The power to determine his future now lies with Rodgers. He acts at MVP level and could lead the Packers to another Super Bowl title. Green Bay will want to keep the 38-year-old around until he really starts to deteriorate. But will Rodgers take matters into his own hands this off-season? How upset was he really about the choice of love? Would Rodgers perhaps try to push him out of the title city as the final action of this year’s tour, with possible quarterback openings in such hot spots as New England, Los Angeles and San Francisco? A franchise sale The NFL as a whole has done properly to inoculate itself from the financial losses that hit most sports leagues during the pandemic. Instead of pushing games or adding weeks, the NFL withdrew its preseason and steamed forward when there was a sign of a health anxiety. We play football! Who is ready to play? Who is watching? We play it on Monday nights and Tuesday nights and Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings, the quality of the games or the health of the players is doomed. It was a profitable strategy for the league, just as much as any league earns money. the Covid age. But the league still consists of old-school owners who have earned most of their money in an old-school way. Although several owners have overcome the financial hardship for their sports institution, many have suffered significant losses in their non-sporting businesses. You only have to look at the NBA to see how even the tech-savvy, self-proclaimed ‘smart’ sports owners have been hit by the pandemic: Tilman Fertitta, the youngest owner of the NBA, who set a record $ 2.2 billion in 2017 paid for the Houston Rockets franchise, earning money in casinos and restaurants. His operations were reduced to 4% during the pandemic, and he was forced to announce his company and also accept an operating loan from the league. There are similar issues in the NFL’s upstairs room. Some homeowners feel the financial cost is much higher than others, especially those whose wealth is based on owning an NFL franchise. (The NFL remains the sports league with the most ‘heritage’ families.) No one will shed a tear for the fattest fat cats, but NFL franchises are hard to give up on owners because they squeeze money. The pandemic changed that. The year 2021 may usher in a group of new owners, as the current owners worst affected by the pandemic are trying to raise funds. Are there going to be Cam Newton takers? Newton’s one-year plan in New England was clear: Get yourself to the smartest, most creative and most stable organization in the sport; shows that he still has a lot of juice left, that he just needs a break; and then sign a mega deal next season, whether it’s with New England or elsewhere, but for as much as Bill Belichick has tried to sell the Patriots-Cam Newton experience this season as a success to the media and fans , it did not work. The offensive staff of the Patriots were creative and by email, and worked Newton’s quirks and lack of accuracy. But all too often as Newton slumped back and tried to play with some sort of rhythm, he seemed to be trying to throw a medicine ball. Newton’s health is the question here. He no longer has the same kind of zipper on his fast ball, and his throwing accuracy that was so during the best of times has now completely fallen off a cliff. Maybe the Patriots are talking another season in Newton as a bridge to what the team’s quarterback future looks like. Maybe they’re telling themselves he looked good before his Covid diagnosis. Perhaps Belichick believes Newton, even with his flaws, will be fine once the Patriots are able to bring back the pieces of their roster that were missed this season due to COVID. But that seems unlikely. It seems that Newton, the great pioneer, the paradigm shifter, is finally being shot. And if Belichick is not willing to enjoy another season, will any other team do it then? And if not, what does Newton do? Exit? Put another year off and hope to get well? It’s hard to imagine Newton doing the rounds as a one-year rifle in a ready-for-tank reconstruction team. Is that it for Bill Belichick? It does not feel like Belichick is slowing down. But at some point, Belichick is going to walk away from the Patriots’ work. Belichick tried to roll things back one more time this season, putting together a roster that missed the core of his defense due to Covid deviations and who did not have a quarterback as Tom Brady moved to Florida has. post-Covid, ready and willing to start a new rebuild after a few years? He has no quarterback, and the backbone of the roster that produced the last Super Bowl is starting to grind – a majority have already or are expected to leave this off-season. Plus: Belichick’s staff is expected to be selected again during the off-season, both on the coaching side and in the Patriots front office. Is it possible that he decides to walk away before things get ugly? The Justin Fields boom The Jaguars have locked up the first choice in the upcoming draft. The choice is expected to be Trevor Lawrence, Clemson’s one-off prospect of a species in life. But as always in a draft cycle, expect Ohio Fields quarterback Justin Fields to run, which will be the best choice in a traditional year. And if former Ohio head coach Urban Meyer is the principal honcho in Jacksonville, look out. The chatter will increase. Leaks will flow. Trade offers will arrive. Lawrence should be the best choice, but there’s a chance Jacksonville will fluctuate with the Jets (for a considerable distance). A JJ Watt trade JJ Watt and the Houston Texans are synonymous with each other. But if Houston is looking for some kind of assets to improve its roster in the off-season, moving Watt is one of the only ways. The Texans have little or no draft capital and have one of the worst capitals in the league. They also have a cluttered grid that is the embodiment of the broken front office that has overseen its construction for the past five seasons. Nevertheless, there is Deshaun Watson, one of the most talented backs in the league. A good quarterback is very right. It can therefore only take five to six smart moves to jump the Texans back into contention, even with the grid holes and the lack of flexibility in the market. One way to show some kind of flexibility, to increase the margin of error when trying to make such moves, is to move away from Watt while still having value. It will be a difficult step financially and culturally, but it will also be wise. And that will enable Watt to get a chance with another organization, where he can get a chance to progress beyond the division round over the next 24 months. New TV Deals As noted in the Guardian’s daring prediction article in 2021, the NFL’s current round of TV rights deals will expire in 2022. As sports are still the only place networks can bank to deliver a large, live audience, and as the NFL continues to be the largest provider of live content (eight of the 2020s, the ten most selected single television broadcasts, were football matches or post-matches), and the bid is expected to be intense and expensive. traditional broadcasting partners. Or it could hand over a more favorable deal to ESPN / Disney, with the possibility that Disney will snatch a coveted Super Bowl and move its broadcasts to ABC. Or it could offer bigger packages to a streaming customer, like Amazon Prime, hoping to get the live sports streaming curve ahead or to compensate for some of the revenue the league and its owners lost in 2020.