Cleveland Browns: J.C. Tretter is the true NFL MVP of 2020 season

The 2020 NFL season wouldn’t have happened without Cleveland Browns center J.C. Tretter.

The 2020 NFL season could not have happened without the wisdom and foresight of the Cleveland Browns‘ J.C. Tretter and the National Football League Players Association in coping with the Covid pandemic.

Early on, some of the NFL owners were still smarting from signing a new labor agreement, and they were in no mood to be cooperative. Exercising common sense during a pandemic was thus a painful exercise for some of them. The players would be expected to perform in front of crowds of 80,000 people each week and be exposed to vastly more risk than the average person, but so what?

If you don’t want to do it, we’ll get someone else, was the reasoning. Hence, their plan was simply to punish players who had the misfortune to get sick, place them on the Non-Football Injury list, take their paychecks away, and move on. That was the owners’ plan, to be blunt and truthful about it.

That was just not going to fly. Fortunately, common sense prevailed. Partly this was due to the effectiveness of Tretter as the most effective President of the NFLPA in history. We may also speculate that legal counsel for the NFL was operating behind the scenes, and probably took some of the hard-line owners behind the tool shed, got out the leather belt, and beat some common sense into their stubborn hides.

You simply cannot treat your employees in the draconian manner that they had proposed. Fortunately, there was a more progressive group of owners that realized that the season was truly in jeopardy, and they realized that they needed to work with the players to come up with a workable plan, not try to cope with a disease with threats.

Tretter, as President of the NFLPA, worked with ownership to assemble a variety of common-sense options, including sending workout equipment to each NFL player to workout from home, allowing each NFL team to meet via cyber-meetings rather than in person, canceling preseason games, expanding the rosters of the practice squads, and implementing safety procedures for minimizing the probability of transmitting the virus from player to player.

Tretter is going to be up for sainthood due to getting the preseason games canceled. Preseason is great for rookies and free agents trying to make the team, but it’s not necessary for veterans. Truly, it would be a very reasonable thing to have players with guaranteed contracts get a bye for the pre-season games. The reason why these games are interesting is that we fans want to see who is going to make the roster. We really don’t want to see the stars exposed to additional injury risk for no reason.

The result of the Covid protocols was several postponements. One of the most protracted difficulties involved the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers. There was also a game in which the Cleveland Browns lost their entire starting wide receiver corps. The biggest crybabies were the Denver Broncos fans because their team had no quarterback for one game. Listen, those of us from Cleveland have had to watch football for the better part of 20 years with no quarterback, so you ought to be able to last one freaking game.

But, despite all that, the NFL was able to get in a complete season and the full slate of playoff games and in all likelihood will get the Super Bowl in as well. This did not have to happen. There were a number of naysayers who said that it was impossible for contact sport to happen in a Covid pandemic.

It was truly impressive that Tretter, the NFLPA, and the owners were able to get it done in the face of a major emergency. Kudos to everyone for getting the 2020 season in the books. It was a great one.