NFL Podcast: Coaches return to facilities and ranking the league's young QBs
On Friday, 31 of the 32 NFL coaching staffs around the league can return to their facilities. What does this mean for the the start of training camps in July and how will the limited press access affect how fans consume and understand the game in 2020 and beyond?
Video Transcript
TEREZ PAYLOR: The coaching staffs are allowed to return to NFL buildings tomorrow. You had the story. People confirmed it this week. Tell our listeners about it, man.
CHARLES ROBINSON: Yeah, so the league office sent a memo to every team saying, hey, guess what, other than San Francisco, everybody's able to get their coaching staffs in if you want. We're not mandating it. It's up to you. There's gonna be a 100-person cap on your individual facilities, and that obviously might have to be augmented depending on what locality you're in, what your local government rules are.
But as a league, we are opening it up to allow coaches to go back. The league and the 49ers are working right now in concert to also get their facility in Santa Clara open so that they can get coaches in. But from what I was told, the 49ers didn't want to stand in the way of 31 other teams. They wanted to go ahead and let everybody get moving.
I think what's interesting, though, is I had a chance to talk to a couple of sources. And I said, OK, so coaches are coming back in. Some teams, it sounds like-- Indianapolis-- there are a few teams that are questioning how quickly they would even allow the coaches to get back in.
I said, what's on the agenda for the players? And essentially what I was told was-- and Adam Schefter had mentioned this, I think, a day or two ago-- that the optimism is fading a bit in terms of getting players in. And it's for a couple of different reasons. I think the fact that the union has not even come remotely close to wanting to approach talking about getting players back in the facility is part of it.
I think that state governments, frankly, some of them have some things on their hands right now that they're dealing with that you're not sitting there going, yeah, we're gonna phase up the sports teams in terms of the phase of our opening. We're gonna move that up a little bit. With the things that are going on as far as the protests across the country, I think that's given some state governments some additional things to think about. All of that is weighing.
And what I was told was-- I had a couple of league sources tell me that there would be guidance from the NFL likely by Friday, if not by Monday. I always tend to think it's gonna go later than earlier, so I would guess early next week there's gonna be some guidance from the league about players. My guess is, now considering how the optimism definitely seems to be pulling back, they're probably gonna sit there and go, you know what, we're just gonna have to go into the break with the virtual program and then deal with training camp being when everybody shows up.
