Jameis Winston

That is the answer to the question.  I realize there is a fun parlor game going on in trying to make it something else but that's what it's going to be and most of the people playing the game know this already.

It was a miserable time, would be a shame to see it end

Ordinarily, preparing to watch your team in a playoff game is a confrontation with mortality.  By this point you know your heroes well. You've learned their strengths and weaknesses. You know their endearing qualities and their annoying faults.  You've seen them endure setbacks and overcome obstacles.  A playoff season is a successful season by most measures so by and large they've done well. You like your team by this point. You've lived an entire journey with them. And now it could all come to a sudden end. So when the day comes that it can all end forever, naturally the question arises, what was it all about?

What was the 2020 Saints season all about? Should it even have happened in the first place? Did it? There were so few witnesses. We've long argued that live pro sports is a kind of civic exercise. It builds community and solidarity among the masses around shared passions, symbols and experiences. It inspires creative and elaborate cultural expression.   Like any entertainment, it offers diversion and comic relief from daily drudgery.  But among such entertainments sports is uniquely populist. Its energy, its sense of authenticity derives from the presence of a crowd.  

But there have been no crowds this year. Despite Gayle Benson's reckless and selfish desire to gather one, and despite the mayor's bending over backward to accommodate her while yelling at you for having Christmas with your family.  Despite Sean Payton's extremely coach-brained scheme to quarantine 50,000 people, there will only be about 3,000 brave but deluded Saints fans in attendance for today's possible concluding event. Even if we set aside the guilt and anxiety that would come with being among that audience during a pandemic, it's not anything like the immersive, cathartic experience of a full Superdome. The risk of being there is real. The benefit is non-existent. 

Again, that's been the case all season, so what have we been doing?  Well we've all been watching on TV and trying, in our increasingly spare leisure when we can allow ourselves to put aside the burning world around us and enjoy something, to connect with something like the experience we remember. And it's in there somewhere.  It's underneath a hundred layers of dissociation and confusion and a laugh track of fake crowd noise, but somewhere in there we can see our guys. There's something of this thing we're all invested in. We still care about that. It's just that, like a lot of things, that's been harder to feel this year.  It could end today.  A whole epoch of it could end, in fact. That's still a shame, right?

Still haunted by the ghost of grandma

Look, of course, there is so much happening all the everywhere at the moment but it is still important to stop and appreciate the little details when we can.  For example, it is adorable that Sean Payton still thinks about this. 

Sean Payton says on WWL radio the statistic that he's beaten 31 teams in the NFL just isn't true.

"It's 32 teams, including the Saints," he says laughing.

"Tampa Bay at home, we're up by four, we run the double reverse and fumble it. I beat the Saints."

— Amie Just (@Amie_Just) December 1, 2020

As well he should. People's grandmas died that day. (Wow, that was almost 13 years ago to the very day! This is quite a momentous week in Saints history, all told.) But it made Sean a better coach so the grannies did not give their lives in vain. We must always remember to thank them for their service.

The worst elected person in Louisiana not named Clay Higgins

 It is Josh Guillory

While the New Orleans Saints wait for approval to have fans in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory on Friday suggested Lafayette would be happy to host the next game — with fans — at the Cajundome.

"If @mayorcantrell will not allow fans in the stands of the Superdome, you are more than welcome to play your home games here in Lafayette. We can have fans safely attend the game. Cajun Field would be a great venue!" Guillory wrote Friday morning on Twitter.

We touched on this in the last post but the primary consideration here is obviously not safety.  It isn't even trolling, really.  Instead it is a deliberate effort to force people to accept the shitty conditions of a post-COVID  existence.  The virus hasn't been stopped or vaccinated and it may never be.  We could think about ways to prevent 200,000 people from dying over the course of six months, or we could just tell everyone to get used to it. The bosses have determined you are to get used to it. And that means, among other things, pretending it is safe to do all the things we normally do.

Dr. Alex Billoux is stepping down as the state Office of Public Health's point person on coronavirus response. Yesterday, he had some parting thoughts on the wisdom of gathering large crowds together to watch football under the current circumstances.  

“In the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of ridiculous,” Billioux said. “If this were a story 100 years from now and I said, 'Listen, you know, people were willing to have three to five people die for a football game every week, because it was that important to them … people were willing to sit next to people with a tremendously infectious disease that kills people because they weren’t willing to go a single season without going to a football game.'”

What kind of an idiot needs to be at a football game right now?  I can say this speaking specifically as the kind of idiot who loves watching football very much. I love going to the Superdome and watching football.  I love going to Tiger Stadium to watch football. I love going to a crowded barroom, or, on occasion, a crowded art gallery or street party to watch football. I am a complete idiot and yet even I do not think any of those things is worth endangering my or anyone else's life right now.

Guillory's "offer" (I don't know if we can consider it an actual good faith offer) to host a Saints game flies directly in the face of Billoux's comments. It doesn't help that the Saints are also applying pressure themselves to bring more fans into the dome.  It would be putting it charitably to say they are being selfish.  More accurately, they and Guillory are engaging in a deliberate ideologically driven campaign to end the Governor and Mayor to end their emergency precautions.  

In a letter to the mayor they publicized today, the Saints claim their health and safety plan "was touted as one of the best and most comprehensive with the ability to safely adapt to numerous seating capacities based on local and state governmental guidance."  They don't say by whom the plan was touted.  Nor do they specifically say what the expectation should be that it would actually mitigate transmission of the virus. But it's a mystery why anyone should think they've got any credibility in that regard. 

We're never coming back from this

Not sure if it's really sinking in for people yet, but "the economy" on the other side of COVID just isn't going to have as many full time jobs as it did before. 

There are still 10.7 million fewer people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, although just over half of the jobs lost in March and April have now been recovered. At this rate, it would take the economy another 16 months to gain back those jobs, although economists say that job gains get more difficult for every month that the recession lasts.

All 10.7 million of those jobs are not coming back.  That isn't part of the plan. The bosses have already won the pandemic and are going to be fine without most of us.

We aren't in the early, completely catastrophic early days of the crisis anymore. People making above $60k are basically back to work, according to the Opportunity Insights Data. The group that is still badly struggling is low-wage service workers. pic.twitter.com/XSRhjokFTc

— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) October 1, 2020

What's left to do now is for the rest of us to "just get used to" the new slightly shittier normal. Which is why, even today, as the nation woke up the news that the President himself has tested positive for the virus, the push is on to end the emergency and impose a sense that the current state of affairs is just the way we live now and that it's time to get on with that.  

Which is why, despite Nancy Pelosi's performative "optimism" that the Trump diagnosis changes the political dynamic, the thing to understand is that help is not on the way.  The US economy... insofar as what it can produce for the benefit of poor and working class people... slid completely off the edge of help in 2008 and has not been brought back from that.  The pandemic is just another step in normalizing the status to which most of us have been relegated.  We're never coming back from this.  We aren't really even expected to.

Large crowds to gather indoors, perhaps

The state has approved a plan for having fans cram into the Superdome to watch the second Saints home game.  They haven't said how many yet. Assume it will be in the thousands. But until they say exactly, it's hard to get a feel for how plausible the logistics of all of this might even be. 

All publicly accessible venues at the Superdome, including the parking garages, Champions Square, the Saints' team shop and the Saints Hall of Fame will be closed to the general public during games that are off-limits to fans. It is not yet known what the policy for the team shop and the Hall of Fame will be, but Champions Square, according to Tuesday's email, will be closed on gamedays. 

If the city signs off on the plan and fans are allowed, the Saints said in the email that they want all season ticket holders "to have equitable access to attend games" and that family members and friends can still attend games together if the tickets are on the same account. 

The number of tickets on an account will be seated together and will be socially distanced away from other groups, the email said.

Okay but in order to get into the building, you have to stand in a long line, get patted down by security, and then squeeze through the corridors and concession/rest room lines.  And, of course, once seated, we assume everyone will be planning to.. you know.. cheer the home team on.  That can be a pretty good way to spread the virus, or so we are told. 

Whatever the plan, it's going to be an awkward sell getting people to stay home from second lines or neighborhood bars when we're allowing indoor football program activities to proceed.  The mayor hasn't made a decision yet. Obviously there are important matters to consider such as the public health implications of setting this precedent too early how much money we can wring out of the deal. 

But, Cantrell suggested approval of the plan would likely hinge on whether the state was willing to give New Orleans more of the federal money set aside for local governments dealing with the COVID pandemic. Cantrell and other city officials have been beating the drum recently about the fact that of $88 million in requests for pandemic-related reimbursements, only about $43 million in expenses have been covered.

"The city of New Orleans needs her fair share of resources that are aligned with the state CARES Act that the state has received and the city of New Orleans," Cantrell said, adding that hosting the Saints would require more manpower and resources from the city.

Update: According to this, the plan is to open at 25% capacity which is something like 20,000 maybe. Sounds difficult.  It also says the mayor is "not even thinking about September 27." So this is probably not ready to happen yet. 

Medical redshirt

For the fans, that is.

In a year that has largely redefined what the word normal means, it should not have come as much of a surprise for New Orleans Saints season ticket holders when they heard they can choose to opt out of their 2020 packages and focus on next season.

The Saints became the latest NFL team to offer deferment of 2020 season tickets to the 2021 season, allowing fans to either use the money already paid toward the cost of their 2021 tickets or to receive a refund upon request.

Might as well take the refund.  By the time 2021 rolls around it's either going to be we've nationalized pro sports or the whole world will be on fire anyway.