Browns center and NFLPA president JC Tretter: ‘The virus won’t kneel down to almighty football’

Editor's note: Tony Grossi is a Cleveland Browns analyst for TheLandOnDemand.com and 850 ESPN Cleveland.

While Major League Baseball, the NBA and NHL struggle with how to begin or conclude their seasons interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the NFL benefits from their trials.

But while the calendar gives the NFL built-in advantages in grappling with the unique challenge of playing through the novel coronavirus, don’t think the league has all the answers.

“There is a long list of hurdles we have to get over and things we have to watch and check,” said Browns center JC Tretter.

Just a couple weeks before Covid-19 shut down all professional sports, Tretter was elected president of the NFL Players Association. In that role, he has presided over bi-weekly Zoom conference calls with players and their families to survey their concerns and dispense information provided by league medical officials.

“With everything that is going on, you have to focus on fitting football inside of this world of coronavirus and not get caught up in trying to fit coronavirus inside of this world,” Tretter said. “There are two different ways of looking at it. The way coronavirus has changed how every industry is working, you can’t expect just to throw football back in and think that the virus is going to kneel down to almighty football. You have to look through different ways of making sure people stay healthy. There are going to be new ideas and it is probably going to look a little different this year, making sure people stay healthy.”

A slow reopen

This week, the NFL authorized teams to begin the process of reopening their facilities if their states allow. The Browns are still finalizing their plans, according to a club spokesman. They could be looking at a reopening in early June, said a source.

There will be phases to the process, with support and business staffs returning first. Each team must appoint an Infection Control Officer to monitor compliance with state and league protocols.

Players undergoing injury rehab with trainers or conditioning coaches will be first to re-enter.

All other coaches and players won’t be admitted until all 32 team facilities are open and functioning.

Until then, virtual offseason programs continue through June 26. Nobody knows when players and coaches will be reunited on the field.

In the case of the Browns, new coach Kevin Stefanski and his staff are trying to build chemistry with an unfamiliar roster through Zoom conference sessions. Rookies joined the daily Zoom sessions with veterans for the first time this week.

“Usually, you have those times one on one in the facility where you have some downtime to get to know guys, and you just do not have that now,” Tretter said. “A lot of it is getting used to it obviously there. They went through rookie minicamp last weekend, and now into this week, a lot of it is just being there for when they need something or when they have a question and letting them get their feet under themselves as they just jump and get thrown right in to this virtual offseason.”

Hurdles to clear

Because of the advantage of time, Tretter said league and union officials have been able to have conversations about the pathway to returning to the field.

Issues such as protecting players with pre-existing conditions and playing a contact sport amid a virus pandemic have not been resolved.

“There are a lot of things,” Tretter said. “We have guys with pre-existing [medical] conditions. Obviously, testing is going to have to be really important to this. There just needs to be a plan, and there are a lot of questions that have to be answered.

“Anytime you kind of come up with an answer, five or six questions pop up from that answer. It is an ever-evolving conversation, and there is really not just a short list of ‘We need these five things.’ This is a contact disease and we play a contact sport. The way this thing passes along is through contact, and that is what we do for a living. The way we interact with each other at the facility, at practice, weight lifting and at the meal room, it is us shoulder-to-shoulder standing by each other and passing things around. There is a long list of ideas we need to come up with to make this environment safe for us.”

It seems far off until football in the fall. The NFL built in possible delays in their season schedule. MLB currently is engaging in a tug-of-war with players over lost revenue versus lost pay.

I asked Tretter how players would react if the NFL had to cancel games and seek pay cuts.

“There will have to be conversations and negotiations over it,” he said. “It is laid out in our CBA. That will be something we will have to come to when we get there. I still think it is a long time out. We see what the world looked like two and a half months ago and how much it has changed in two and a half months. We still have kind of two, two and a half months until we have to have these things laid out. There is still a lot of time. A lot of things can change. We just have to follow it, make sure we are always having the conversations and be ready for whenever that conversation has to happen.”

Tretter wouldn’t even speculate on his percentage of optimism on a full season beginning on time.

“I have been trying to live in kind of two-week increments because the information is ever-changing and ever-evolving,” he said. “The thing about this disease is it is a novel, emerging disease. That means it is constantly changing, it is brand new and we are continuing to learn about it. You can’t really look that far ahead because a lot of new information can come out, and there is really no reason to live in a lot of different hypotheticals or else I feel like you kind of get paralyzed in those hypotheticals, where you keep going down different rabbit holes and you kind of lose track of the now.”