Every media member attending the Bengals annual Weenie Roast and Mock Turtle Soupfest Monday wore a mask to the festivities.
If you wanted to dine gloriously, you had to remove your facial covering. If we’re keeping score, none of the Bengals high-ups in attendance wore a mask, from Mike Brown to Zac Taylor to Duke Tobin to members of The Family.
That comes up now and still because the NFL has decided to get tough on this issue, with players, coaches, support people and media. (Not with fans, though. More on that momentarily.) Let other businesses stay soft on the subject of vaccinations, mask-wearing and all the other accouterments of the COVID Era. If you want to play ball in the NFL, you better play by the NFL’s rules.
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If you don’t, there’s a chance your team will be forced to forfeit a canceled game. . . and you won’t get paid. Let that rattle around your facemask cages, players. You. . . won’t. . . get. . . paid.
That will only happen if a postponed game cannot be rescheduled. The team with the positive tests will take the presumptive L, but nobody from either team will get a paycheck that week.
“I like to think we can work through this cooperatively. We all want the same goal. I don’t know that I appreciate being threatened. I’m aware of it. Probably that’s what they wanted. It might incentivize us,’’ Mike Brown said.
The Bengals say about 90 percent of their players are at least partly vaccinated. The league average is closer to 80 percent. In the meantime, the league has created two NFLs, for players: The lepers and the non-lepers, those without shots and those with them.
If you’re vaccinated, life will be nearly the way it was before March 2020. No daily testing, no masks at the team facility, no social distancing, no restrictions on the road. Have a seat in the team cafeteria, have lunch, meet, hang out, work out, etc.
If you’re a leper, get tested every day, wear a mask inside the facility, no eating with your non-leper teammates, enjoy team and position meetings virtually, no leaving the team hotel on the road, to eat at a restaurant, no interaction with anyone outside the team traveling party. No steam, no sauna, no working out when the weight room is crowded with non-lepers.
Man, if you ever cost your mates 1/17th of their take-home, you better hire a couple bodyguards.
And you know what? This is a great idea.
Maybe President Joe Biden should have lunch with Roger Goodell. Perhaps the NFL commissioner would tell the president that the time for pleading with the non-vaccinated has passed. If you don’t have a medical or religious reason for not getting vaccinated, get vaccinated.
We can’t force you, of course. But as the NFL is showing, we can urge you in quite obvious ways.
We’ve tried other methods. Free beer! Free food! Ohio bribed people with chances to win $1 million. We’ve been patient to a fault. But when a state starts forbidding its hospitals from requiring their workers to be vaccinated (Montana), the time for patience is done.
Your rights don’t supersede mine. I’ve done the right things. I’m not willing to let your wrong things undermine that. If you can’t behave responsibly, well, things should get a little sticky for you.
You’d like to travel by means other than your own vehicle? Get a shot. You’d like to work for the government, or have a job because of a government contract? Get a shot. Are you a student in need of a loan? Get a shot. These were all suggestions made in a recent article in The Atlantic magazine They’re all reasonable.
If you refuse a shot because you’ve read lies on social media and believe them, if you see not getting vax’ed as some sort of middle-finger flip at science/government/liberals, OK. But your (in)action should have consequences.
People are dying that shouldn’t be. People are getting sick needlessly. New case levels are back to where they were in the depths of the pandemic that we were just starting to believe was ending. On Monday, there was a new case in the United States every 64 seconds. We’re losing again. That’s on you.
The NFL is not nearly so diligent with fans, who will enjoy stadia at full capacity and can enter without proof of vaccination or a recent negative test. Why media need to be tested once every two weeks (we do) while untested and un-vaccinated fans can scream their lungs out shoulder to shoulder in a packed stadium is hypocrisy and a question for another day.
“Extreme urgency. Can’t waste a day,’’ Zac Taylor said. The coach was talking about preparing for a football season, not attacking a virus. But the message is the same. Good on ya, NFL
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