This is normally the last week or two before players and coaches and staff think of going somewhere, anywhere, to get far away from football, to vacation before training camp. Nothing normal about these days, though. The other day, when Patriots defensive backs and twins Devin and Jason McCourty sat down to record their podcast, “There was no way we could talk football,” Devin McCourty said. “You couldn’t even talk the pandemic. Everything was about equality, about George Floyd, about the protests. It was overwhelming.”
Team meetings via Zoom, overtaken league-wide by listening sessions—black players and coaches took the floor, for days on several teams, and the air got very heavy with stories of American inequities from black players.