Will we officially find out this week if there will be any preseason games this summer? It’s hard to say for sure but with the start of NFL training camps now just three weeks away, one would think that the league will have some major announcements by this Friday at the latest. While it’s already being reported that the NFL will soon announce that the 2020 preseason will surely be cut in half at the very least, one veteran player reported on Twitter Tuesday that he’s hearing that there will be no preseason games this summer. The player reporting that news is Baltimore Ravens backup quarterback Robert Griffin III.
“Sources say there will be no preseason this year,” Griffin tweeted on Tuesday.
Griffin’s Tuesday tweet comes on the heels of the NFLPA board of representatives passing a resolution last Thursday, calling on the NFL to cancel all 2020 preseason games. Additionally, Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter, the current NFLPA president, had quite a few interesting comments in a Tuesday morning post on the NFLPA website. He linked to that post in a Tuesday morning tweet along with a short statement.
“The NFLs unwillingness to follow the recommendations of its own experts will put this season and the safety of all players at risk. This year must look differently if we hope to play a full season and crown a Super Bowl Champion,” Tretter tweeted.
Tretter’s closing paragraph in his Tuesday post speaks volumes with just three weeks ti go before training camps start.
“We don’t want to merely return to work and have the season shut down before we even get started,” Tretter wrote. “The NFLPA will do its part to advocate for player safety. We will continue to hold the NFL accountable and demand that the league use data, science and the recommendations of its own medical experts to make decisions. It has been clear for months that we need to find a way to fit football inside the world of coronavirus. Making decisions outside that lens is both dangerous and irresponsible.”
We’ll wait and see if the NFL responds to Tretter’s Tuesday post. In the meantime, however, it certainly is seeming more and more likely that there won’t be any preseason games played this summer. Maybe that will be officially confirmed by the end of this week along with official word on how teams will conduct training camps and the size of rosters each will utilize for the remainder of the offseason.
