Yahoo Finance Snitch your hearts out, everyone. The NFL season may depend on it
Someone in the NFL owes Major League Baseball a case of Champagne. Or at this rate, maybe some acreage in a French vineyard.
This week’s edition of “Don’t be that guy” brought us Cleveland Indians pitchers Zach Plesac and Mike Clevinger, who were both busted violating the team’s COVID-19 protocols last Saturday night — taking an excursion into Chicago with some friends during a road series against the White Sox. Plesac returned in the wee hours of the morning, only to be caught by MLB security that was on hand to ensure coronavirus protocols weren’t being broken. Clevinger, who didn’t even bother to return to the hotel, was busted later in the ensuing investigation.
With the possibility of having exposed himself to the coronavirus, Plesac was forced to drive back to Cleveland in a rental car. Clevinger, on the other hand, made the stupefying decision to conceal that he had been with Plesac during their night out, thus allowing himself to fly back to Cleveland (while possibly infected) on the team plane.
This is why some teams and the NFL Players Association have set up snitch lines. No matter how much teams trust their players to do the right thing, someone is almost always going to give in to the wrong thing. No matter the threat of serious fines, which the NFL and union have jointly agreed to put into place. No matter the number of impassioned speeches from coaches (see this week’s premiere of HBO’s “Hard Knocks”). And no matter the number of times professional baseball proves one enduring point: A well-constructed plan is only as strong as the willpower of the selfish fools who are responsible for following it.
And therein lies the lesson for the NFL. With well over 2,000 players and an army of coaches, personnel and support staff in the mix, the honor system is a ticking time bomb. The age-old “never ever” omertà when it comes to snitching has to be suspended in professional football. The only way to regulate the NFL’s non-existent bubble is for everyone who wants football to create one themselves. A snitch bubble, if you will.
One that is inhabited by anyone and everyone, whether they’re in the league or not. That includes players, coaches, team personnel, media, fans, family and everyone in between. If the garden gnome sees someone from an NFL team heading out for a night on the town, they had better hijack a wheelbarrow and get to a phone.
That’s the last line of defense here to ensuring an NFL season stays on the rails: the “everyone” guardrails.
As in, everyone with a phone. Everyone with a social media account. Everyone with any shred of proof that an NFL team employee is violating protocols, from the top of the food chain to the bottom. They have to air that information out. Publicly and loudly, if necessary. This includes people inside the building and out. And it requires fans who often know the faces of the players and coaches and employees who live in their town to take part in that snitching effort.
This means no crowded nightclubs without masks. Same for packed bars. No indoor entertainment venues like concerts or sporting events, unless there is some significant distance. No giant house parties. Rinse, repeat, look for a way to snitch. Even if it’s the unpopular thing to do.
As baseball has shown us with the Miami Marlins, Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Cardinals, it takes only a few guys blowing off the protocols to push an entire season to the brink. And given the NFL’s prevalence of on-field contact, senior-aged coaches and players with comorbidities, the cliff is steeper and more treacherous than any other league.
A Mike Clevinger situation needs to be avoided at all costs. He flew on a team plane with a 61-year-old manager and a teammate who was stricken with leukemia only one year ago. And he did it after having the remarkable gall to preach one month ago about players holding each other accountable for following the rules.
“This isn’t going to be a ‘run to daddy’ kind of thing,” Clevinger told reporters on July 30. “We’re going to handle it in-house. This is a player discipline thing. Keep the coaches, front office kind of out of it. It puts a little extra accountability, kind of. Just having that trust in your teammates is a big thing. It’s a big thing on the field. If you feel your teammate doesn't trust you off the field, how are you going to feel like he trusts you when you get between the lines?”
This is a stellar illustration of how trusting a preaching player to live by his own words is a dicey proposition.
It will be no different in the NFL. That’s why everyone involved in the NFL ecosystem (and outside of it) has to be willing to snitch when they see a problem. It won’t be easy, of course. The league and most especially the players have a deeply rooted “no snitching” mentality. Violating it can make you a target. Look no further than the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal nearly nine years ago, which generated several years of wonderment about who were the whistleblowers during an intense league investigation into player-targeting.
While it has been generally wildly unacceptable to tattle in the NFL, these are also wild times. And they call for wild measures. Some of which are as simple as team employees accepting a “see something, say something” attitude; players being willing to use the snitch line set up by their union; and everyone else toeing that same kind of line.
In a season when nothing will be fair to almost anyone involved, one of the few fair things still on the table is the ability to pick up a phone, post a photo or send an email, making sure that nobody has the freedom to pick up a team or a season and foolishly carry it into the unknown any given Saturday night.
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