The Denver Broncos are the butt of everyone’s jokes this Monday.
As the Washington Post wrote today, “The coronavirus has turned the NFL into a joke, and nobody should be laughing.”
But, all NFL fans are laughing at the Broncos.
That, after the 31-3 drubbing at the hands of the New Orleans Saints, who also didn’t have their starting quarterback in sure-fire Hall of Famer Drew Brees. If the Saints were limited in their offensive production, the Broncos were a three-legged horse. Hobbled.
Kendall Hinton completed one pass but threw two interceptions. He was the first quarterback to do that since Ryan Leaf in 1998. Denver was forced to put Phillip Lindsay in at “quarterback” to run the wildcat, something we hadn’t seen all year prior to this bizarre game.
That desperation of putting Lindsay in the backfield to take the snaps led to his first-ever NFL fumble. Bizarre, indeed.
Drew Lock, the embattled second-year QB, and his position-mates were all disqualified from playing because they met without their masks on. After their maskless meeting, backup Jeff Driskel caught COVID-19, leaving Lock and Blake Bortles as “close contacts” and out of the game.
Broncos fans were upset, thinking the NFL was unfair in forcing them to play despite all their quarterbacks being sidelined. Hell, the Ravens have 20 players on the COVID-19/reserve list.
But, as Andrew Brandt said tonight, “It is wrong to equate the Broncos situation, or other ones before it, with the Ravens. The NFL will not move games due to competitive balance issues, those are ‘tough luck’ situations.”
AKA: All your quarterbacks didn’t wear their masks and now you’re out of quarterbacks? Too bad. So sad.
This isn’t Weld County. This is the NFL.
Instead of being mad at the NFL, where the Broncos fans should instead point their ire is at Drew Lock himself.
Lock, the starting quarterback trying to prove himself as the QB of the future, lacked one of the most important qualities for the position, leadership.
Quarterbacks have to know every player’s assignment on every play, not just their own. They have to stay calm under pressure and pull through when the team needs them most.
Leaders do what’s best for the group, not just themselves. And Lock was anything but a leader when it came to taking the COVID-19 protocols seriously.
“We count on them to be the leaders of the team and leaders of the offense and those guys made a mistake and that is disappointing,” head coach Vic Fangio said Monday about Lock and the quarterbacks after practice. “I mean, yeah, we’re all disappointed that it happened.”
Beyond that, the NFL will look into the incident and may discipline the Broncos, and even if the league doesn’t Fangio said the team may do so to Lock and Co.
In all honesty, the sheer audacity of the National Football League to hold this season under these circumstances is ballsy to say the least. While the NBA and NHL played in a “bubble” and enjoyed near flawless seasons, the NFL decided to go on full steam ahead during a pandemic, playing an extremely physical game and having the players travel.
Yes, there are protocols put in place, but they’re a sloppy set of rules which have been violated in almost every game. Look at the sidelines; coaches and players remove their masks frequently.
There have been wild inconsistencies and no one really expected the league to take this pandemic seriously.
And when the league didn’t take it seriously, neither did the players.
But, Lock didn’t follow the simplest of rules. The rule we are all expected to follow any time we’re around other humans in this crisis; wear a mask. Lock apologized on twitter, saying the team is “following all the rules,” but also admitted to letting his “mask slip.”
It was a weak apology at best, coming one hour before his Broncos were embarrassed on national TV against a contending Saints team.
Lock has been basically the worst quarterback in all of football this year, in all the tangible ways one can evaluate a player. Last week, his leadership slipped, too. But, don’t tell fans. They’re still waiting for an apology (which will never come) from the NFL.
For Lock, this isn’t a nail in the coffin, but it is one more way he’s proving he isn’t the quarterback of the future.