In a league dominated by brutal injuries, NFL players have to be replaceable. Lost a step? Next man up. Nearly lost a leg? Next man up. Concussion? Next man up, now that we treat players for them.
But the pandemic has laid bare that NFL-level players are not quite as disposable as the league wants them to be. In order to tamp down on potential outbreaks, the league has implemented a relatively strict surveillance regime that has knocked out whole position groups for several teams, with disastrous results. When the next man up can’t throw, catch or block, the whole thing falls apart.
“Next man up” has always been a curious fit with the NFL. It would make some sense in a sport with a fully functioning minor league system, or even a single developmental league. Instead, as the league’s pandemic plan has accidentally proved, when NFL rosters get thin, there’s nowhere to go.
In a way, it would be a more suitable motto for a sport like baseball, which has a massive system of underpaid backup players that teams can call on in any moment.
When the Marlins lost half their roster to COVID, they were able to call up a talented if slightly unseasoned group of minor leaguers and rip off a winning streak. When the Broncos lost four quarterbacks to a “masking slip,” they had to start a medical salesman and couldn’t move the ball; when the Browns lost four players to a hot tub, they had to slot a dog trainer in the lineup and lost to the freaking Jets.
No one embodied “next man up” more than the Patriots, who spent the last two decades winning Super Bowls with Tom Brady and a bunch of purported nobodies. This offseason, Brady left and eight players, including key parts of the defense, opted out because of the pandemic. With an entire roster of next men, the Patriots are terrible. How’s the “year of Next Man Up” going?
“I don’t think it should have as big of an impact as it’s having,” Trent Green repeatedly said on Sunday’s CBS broadcast of the Browns not having their top four receivers for the game. It really wasn’t that complicated. The Browns couldn’t pass because they didn’t have any receivers, they couldn’t protect the quarterback because the receivers were never open, and they couldn’t run because they couldn’t pass. It made for an offense bad enough to lose to the Jets.
Green suffered a horrific knee injury in a 1999 preseason game and the Rams’ quarterback situation seemed so dire that Dick Vermeil broke down crying about it, although to be fair Vermeil would get teary at the thought of a crisp punt coverage. Instead, former grocery store shelf stocker Kurt Warner came in and led the greatest offense of all time. So maybe Green is excessively invested in “next man up,” but he’s far from alone.
Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield came into the Jets game one of the hottest players in football. He came out of it having a self-flagellating meltdown, leaving the post-game Zoom call after one question and saying “There’s no excuse” and “I failed this team” over and over again. There’s one excuse: You had never practiced or played with the three wide receivers who played, and the receivers themselves were not very good.
But the NFL would rather contort itself around its foundational lies than just admit they’re lies. Mayfield’s teammates and coaches were tripping over themselves to say that actually, it was their fault the Browns lost. “I’m one of the reasons we did lose this game,” cornerback Denzel Ward said. “That has nothing to do with the result of this game,” coach Kevin Stefanski said of having to game plan for no receivers on zero notice and do a game-day walk-through in a parking garage.
Players and coaches can be forgiven for saying things they don’t totally believe; you certainly can’t play a football game if you feel defeated before it starts. But there’s no excuse for people covering the game, even former players. On CBS’s halftime show, Nate Burleson exhorted Mayfield to “have a Michael Jordan effect” on his crappy temporary teammates, while Boomer Esiason said that for the Browns, there was “no use crying over spilled milk.” In this case, several gallons of milk were spilled on a pile of receiver gloves, and weren’t cleaned up before kickoff. You don’t need to be Dick Vermeil to cry over that.
“Next man up” has always been more of an abstraction than practice. NFL teams don’t really have room for robust backup plans, and pro football has no other league to instantly pluck players from.
It exists as an idea in service of tamping down the value and personality of players while tying fans’ investment to laundry and not individuals.
But the league’s COVID surveillance regime has turned it into an actual way of operating for most of the league. In theory, it’s a dumb mantra for making star athletes disposable. In practice, it makes for unwatchable football.
