The Big Silent

The first weekend of the NFL season kicks off tonight, and in Arrowhead Stadium there will be fans turning the night red for the their Super Bowl champion Chiefs, and down on the field Patrick Mahomes and Deshaun Watson will be doing the usual wondrous things, and it will be like football never left.

Well ... kinda.

Those fans, for instance, will only be turning the night kinda red, because only about 17,000 fans will be allowed in the place on account of this is the year of our Lord 2020, aka What A Year Would Look Like If Salvador Dali Or Edvard Munch Were In Charge.

And so on Sunday and Sunday night and Monday night, they'll be mostly playing the games in ghost towns, all the usual suspects doing their thing to the moaning of a lonely prairie wind blowing tumbleweeds and banging shutters in empty windows in the great vacancy of the stadiums.

This is because the great majority of teams have opted to play without fans until at least October, and then allow only a tiny fraction of the usual multitude to attend. The Indianapolis Colts are one of the few exceptions, and even then they're only going to let about 2,500 in Lucas Oil for the home opener on Sept. 20. That's a whole lot of seats that won't be filled with the usual Jeff Saturday or Peyton Manning or T.Y. Hilton jerseys.

So it will not be normal -- a concept that seems increasingly alien in a nation that's apparently decided a killer pandemic is just something else to be ignored, and if it kills Granny ... well, she was old, anyway. We're gonna do whatever we want to do regardless, because that's just who we are.

But a monument to American capitalism like the NFL has to at least pretend it cares about such matters, and so there will be masks and social distancing on the sidelines and the Big Silent in the stands. And frankly it won't change very much your viewing experience at home, because it's not like this is college football -- where half the experience is the alumni and the tailgating and the social ramble, with a football game merely providing the framework for all that.

The NFL is different. Fans have their allegiances, to be sure, but it's not like they invested four years of their precious youth at Colts University. Their team is just their team, not an integral part of their life experience.

And yet, pro football is America's game. And it's back, of a fashion. And maybe it lasts and maybe it doesn't. So that's something at least.

Mantra for our times, that.