The Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens were supposed to be the dessert on Thanksgiving for America. Instead it became a 5pm kick off on a Wednesday afternoon in Pittsburgh.
Surely the NFL ate a lot of money with that decision, but it had to be made due to the Ravens outbreak of COVID. During the entire debacle which was the rescheduling of that game the league insisted that they wanted to avoid adding an extra week to the season. And they especially didn't want to do it for one game.
Commissioner Roger Goodell talked about the conversations he had with his medical experts, and the Ravens organization this week at the Super Bowl.
"We were down to the final days in that Pittsburgh-Baltimore game. Had that not cleared on that Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning, we probably would not have played that Wednesday game, and we may have had an 18th week at that point”, he said.
An 18th week would've been for teams that had games cancelled that had playoff implementations. Which with different tie breakers it could've been teams not even making the playoffs being forced to play.
“But it did clear. Our medical people were exactly right”, Goodell said. “We were 24 hours later than we thought. But that is the kind of decision where we were able to find solutions to give us that time to make sure that the safety issue was addressed properly”.
“It’s never good to make decisions where there’s so much uncertainty. That’s the hardest problem we had this year, is you had so much uncertainty. Decisions are easy when you have certainty, and you know that this is going to happen, this is going to happen”.
“What was difficult during the season was trying to manage things where there was a lot of uncertainty, but what we could do is we could determine when it was safe and when it was not safe, and we did not proceed when it was not safe. We were able to understand that, and until it was controlled, we didn’t move forward”.
The Ravens essentially were at the end of their breakout, and were forced to play with mostly backups, but the NFL got the game in. What the end game of a twice moved Wednesday afternoon game did to the Steelers? It's unknown, but an epic collapse ensued directly following it.
