The confusion is palpable.
By this point, in a normal year, the Bills would have been 11 days into training camp and looking ahead a week to the preseason opener at Baltimore.
But this is nowhere near a “normal” campaign.
The Covid-19 pandemic has shaken the National Football League to its core, though it steadfastly maintains the regular season will commence as scheduled, meaning the Bills will host the Jets on Sept. 13.
But the lead-up has been profoundly altered starting with the cancellation of the exhibition games.
Players are finally permitted in Buffalo’s practice facility, the ADPRO Sports Training Center, but with social distancing and a limited staff. This period is a designated conditioning phase meaning the team can’t work out in pads for two more weeks (Aug. 21).
That leaves coach Sean McDermott precious-little time to cull his 80-man roster to the top 53 plus a 16-man practice squad.
His only solace is that the NFL’s other 31 head coaches are in the same quandary.
In a recent Zoom call, he talked about the challenges.
McDERMOTT admitted, “You get a little bit frustrated because you want to make progress and you want to move the team forward, especially since we haven’t been together for some time. That said, I always try and remind myself in the next minute, “I understand this is being done for a reason” and I support that. We’ve got to be smart.”
What’s the effect of no preseason games?
“When I first heard that … I think just understanding ‘why’ is important and trying to educate myself and listening on what the reasons were,” he said. “The more that I listened to the ‘why’ I understand.
“Certainly I would like to have preseason games, but it’s been done before. Maybe not always in the NFL, but colleges do it or something similar every year. So I’ve reached out to my college coach and he certainly had a lot of success, and we’ve got a lot of smart people in this building that have come from a lot of different backgrounds that can help. I’m confident that we’ll adjust (and) that our players will adjust and we’ll have a good plan in place to get our team ready to go.”
But there’s now an even bigger priority on maximizing practice time.
“As coaches,” he conceded, “it really challenges us to be sharp and on top of our game. Reps are always important. But how we plan practice … we spend a lot of time on that. Who gets the reps, how many reps, are we challenging the guys enough, are we putting them into, because of no preseason games, situations that they would have seen through preseason games?
“I think from a planning standpoint, not just with the COVID end but also now on the field, there’s a lot of planning and we’ve got to be razor sharp on that end.”
Many fans feel that given the absence of the normal training camp protocols and exhibition games, it will translate to a compromised product come the regular season.
“I’m not lowering my standards and I don’t expect anyone in this building to be lowering their standards,” McDermott said. “What I’ve seen so far honestly, is an unbelievable display of a standard in our building with the effort that’s been put in by our ops staff, from leadership on down.
“They’ve done a great job getting our building ready and I’ve been very impressed with the standard that I’ve seen to this point and I expect us to carry that through. I’m watching other leagues out there and you wonder how much of some of the rust or errors is because of maybe the lack of time together. We maintain a high level of expectations, and a standard that we live by here in the building.”
Still, he’s never faced a challenge quite like this one.
“But I’m sure (that’s true) for a lot of us,” McDermott said. “This is a unique time in our world. It’s a leadership issue to me (but) it’s not that we can solve it. What can we do to solve what we can solve? That’s a big part of my job and (general manager) Brandon Beane’s job and the leadership in our building … to solve the riddle every day.
“I don’t think anyone’s going to be clean through all of this. With the (coronavirus) cases, it’s going to continue to be around as we’re being told by medical people, we’ve just got to find a way to control the controllables.”
(Chuck Pollock, a Times Herald senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@oleantimesherald.com)
