There’s a lot of grey area baked into the NFL’s proposed attendance policy for the upcoming season, and one of the team’s owners clearly wants it to be amended.
Some teams have already shared their plans to have fans in the stands at games, but others could be restricted by governors in some states preventing them from doing so.
In fact, states like California have hinted that it won’t allow any fans in the stands at games this season, whereas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has already come out and said his team has a plan to host more than 40,000 — despite the continued spread of the coronavirus in Texas.
It’s rare that an issue as major as this one can have sides so far apart, but that’s what the pandemic has brought forth. As for Raiders owner Mark Davis, well, he appears to want a bit more structure baked into the league’s fan attendance policy, calling it the “wild, wild, west.”
“Everything else in this offseason has been equity,” Davis told Vic Tafur of The Athletic. “That if California wasn’t going to allow teams to go to their own facility, such as us — to go to Alameda — or the Rams or Niners . . . if only one team couldn’t go to their own facility, all 32 couldn’t go. The worst-case scenario state went for everybody — so there was equity all the way through, everywhere.
“The draft — since you couldn’t bring players into one state, you couldn’t bring them into anywhere, so we went virtual. And then, you get into attendance at the stadium and all of a sudden it’s the wild, wild west. ‘You all make your own decisions, don’t look at us. It’s not up to us.’ It’s like, whoa!”
Davis never ceases to amaze with his bizarre analogies, but he does raise a solid point there. A bit more structure on the attendance policy will be needed going forward, given how polarizing the issue is.
