Playing Sunday Night Football In Tampa Bay Is Completely Immoral
The NFL is putting thousands of lives at risk by choosing to keep Sunday Night Football in Tampa Bay this Sunday
The Kansas City Chiefs are scheduled to visit the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for their first rematch of Super Bowl 55. The game will get the prime-time showcase it deserves, with Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady slated to meet, for possibly the last time, on Sunday Night Football.
At the same time, Florida is currently being devastated by Hurricane Ian. The brutal storm has been pouring rain on the Sunshine State and sending 39-mile-per-hour winds from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic ocean. The National Hurricane Center has issued watches and warnings to all of Florida and several cities across the eastern coastline, calling attention to the severity of the incoming flooding and hurricane winds.
The death toll is currently at 14, with the expectations being that the numbers will rise significantly as the coast guard and local officials are able to return to the areas of the highest damage. According to USA Today, local sheriffs and dispatchers have received thousands of calls of locals stranded and injured. Insurers and analysts predict that Florida alone will suffer more than 25 billion dollars in damages.
So, make it make sense that the NFL has chosen to keep Sunday Night Football in Tampa Bay, Florida.
Sunday Night Football Requires Thousands of Workers to Make Happen
An NFL game would not be an issue if it were just about getting two teams of fifty-three players in the same place, at the same time. However, it is quite a bit more complicated than that. Both teams have coaching staff, trainers, medical staff, interns, media team members, cheerleaders, and many more. There are also league officials, league media employees, referees, and independent doctors.
Then, there are thousands of fans in attendance, several of whom are traveling a significant distance to watch their favorite teams and players play. You have to feed those fans, so add in a few hundred employees to run the food stands and various restaurants inside the arena. The arena also has parking staff, ushers, security, fan connection personnel, cleaning staff, field maintenance (Hurricane rains and wind will tear will the field up and create an extremely dangerous surface for players in and of itself), timekeepers, scoreboard operators.
Then there is the national broadcast team, and NBC always brings a ton of staff to Sunday Night Football. Media personalities, camera operators, sideline reporters, producers, tech support, directors, and statisticians. Local media will also have to have camera operators, photographers, and reporters on the sidelines to provide coverage.
These are not people who are just in danger on Sunday either. A game day experience, and especially a Sunday Night Football experience, require thousands of workers working around the clock from Monday to the opening kickoff. With Sunday’s game being kept in Tampa, these employees are having to stay in Florida and in Tampa, despite the damage and evacuation orders coming their way. Many of them are having to be separated from their family in order to prepare a field for grown men to throw a ball on.
There are also countless truckers and drivers required to haul equipment, food, and even people to make the game happen. Local emergency workers, like police officers, firefighters, and EMTs make themselves available for events the size of NFL games, meaning not only are more people in danger, those are resources being taken away from a city that really needs them right now.
Oh, but I am certain the $1,000,000 donation from the Glazer family, owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers makes up for these risks. Only forty thousand more donations of that size match the projected property damage alone for just Florida. Hopefully a rainy, messy, and immoral Sunday Night Football was worth it.