The defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs are planning to have Arrowhead Stadium at 20% capacity for their season opener against the Houston Texans in less than three weeks.
In preparation for this, Kansas City will host 2,000 fans at the same venue for practice on Saturday. According to head coach Andy Reid, this will act as a dry run for the team.
“We’ll all stay on the same sideline, come out of the tunnel and so on, things the guys won’t have a chance to do in the preseason games,” Reid said, via Adam Teicher of ESPN.
This is somewhat surprising in that a lot of other teams have already announced that the early portion of their regular-season schedule will be played without fans in attendance. One team in that of the Las Vegas Raiders is planning to play all eight home games in an empty venue.
How will the 2020 NFL season look?
As we have noted in the past, fans being able to attend games will depend heavily on the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in certain regions as well as policies put forth by both local government leaders and health experts.
For example, it’s highly unlikely that any of California’s three NFL teams will welcome fans into games at all this season. On the other hand, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones seems to think that his locality is well-equipped for fans to attend games. Whether that’s the case remains to be seen.
For pretty much all 32 NFL teams, Week 1 of the regular season is going to be difficult. The preseason was canceled. In-person off-season activities were canceled, too.
It will be interesting to see how many other teams follow the Chiefs’ lead in this regard.