Alan Greenwood

While watching folks skewer Roger Goodell is always a hoot, occasionally he does make the right call.

Proceeding with the NFL free agent season, and the draft next month, is one of them.

Goodell and the league are being criticized for trying to maintain some sense of business as usual during the coronavirus pandemic. Essentially, the criticism bold down to this:

“How could anyone think of anything else as people around the world are being infected and dying?”

One man’s answer: Because locking ourselves in self-imposed exile can be made at least a smidgen more tolerable if we have something to distract us from the universal sense of doom.

Debating the merits of Tom Brady’s decision to go or stay is a lot more fun than prowling every supermarket in the area for that last roll of toilet paper.

If reports of Brady’s dwindling list of suitors are accurate, Bill Belichick’s disdain for Brady’s TB12 training bobo must have truly drilled into a raw nerve. It is being suggested that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the Patriots’ lone competitor in the Brady Sweeps.

Only a deeply rooted grudge could spur Brady to end his career as a TB Buc.

But we digress.

The point is, would you rather be thinking football or brooding over how long it is going to take the country and the rest of the world to return to something close to normal?

Every day seems one step closer to the NBA and the NHL foregoing not only the rest of their regular seasons but the playoffs, unless there is a plan in place to start training camps one day after Game 7’s. Major League baseball has set the middle of May as the earliest its seasons would begin, and that is dismissed as a pipe dream.

The New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletics Association officially cancelled its remaining winter tournaments and says spring teams can begin their preseasons April 13. If that actually happens it would be astounding.

So here we are, digging in for long-term isolation, wishing and hoping, fretting and fearful. But no one needs to spend every waking moment oozing anxiety over when and how this real-life Twilight Zone will end.

Arguing over who will be quarterbacking the New England Patriots next season is a tiny gift for the soul.

Contact Alan Greenwood at 594-1248 or agreenwood@nashuatelegraph.com.

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