Episode 57 The Detroit Lions, the NFL, and other issues in the age of Covid Ron Wood August 22, 2020 Rich Helppie: This is Rich Helppie your host of the Common Bridge. Today we welcome to the Common Bridge a very special guest. Rod Wood is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Detroit Lions football team, a member of the National Football League. He runs all of the football and business operations for the team. He reports directly to the principal Owner and Chairman, Sheila Ford-Hamp. He was appointed Team President in November of 2015. Shortly thereafter he assisted the Ford family with the search and the ultimate hiring of Bob Quinn as the franchise’s new general manager in 2016. Rod’s got a great approach to business; everything’s on the table, looking at every piece of the operation: fan experience, facilities and imaging of the Detroit Lions. And at this time the professional sports have an important role as we are dealing with the Corona virus and the resulting restrictions on movement, and also, of course, center with the social justice issues of the day. And we’re going to be talking about that. A couple other things in Rod’s background-over a hundred million dollar investment he led into a complete overhaul of the fan experience, including new video boards at Ford Field, and I can tell you, having been there, it is a great fan experience; re-branding the team but emphasizing the classic Honolulu blue and silver. Off the field he provides support for a $600,000 commitment from Mrs. Ford and the Detroit Lions players toward the launch of the Detroit Lions Inspire Change. This is the team’s social justice initiative in the city of Detroit. This initiative will continue into 2020 through grants to nine Metro Detroit organizations. At the legal level Rod serves on the NFL’s Investment Committee, and he’s very well suited for this because for eight years prior to his appointment, as team president, Rod worked closely with the Detroit Lions and the Ford family in his role as President and Chief Executive of Ford Estates. Rod came well- prepared to the Ford family and to Detroit. He was Executive Vice President for Wealth Management for The Wilmington Trust Company in Wilmington, Delaware. And prior to that, he was with Comerica Bank where he oversaw offices in four different states-over 12 offices. He has a lengthy resume for philanthropic work and indeed his entire biography is on the website RichardHelppie.com. Rod’s a local guy-graduated from Goodrich Michigan High School, went on to get his bachelor’s from the University of Michigan and a graduate degree from the ABA Graduate School Of Commercial Banking. Rod, all of this responsibility you’ve got with this background, where are you spending your time today? Rod Wood: Well this year is incredibly unusual given the pandemic. So I’m spending all of my time at our Allen Park training facility. In a normal year, I kind of split my time half between Allen Park, where the team is, and Ford Field where their business operations are, but all of our business folks are continuing to work from home. And so this year I’m here with the team, the coaches and the players. Rich Helppie: Well today we are going to talk about the Corona virus and how football can be played. We’re going to, of course, touch a little bit about professional sports in this hyper political world and quest for social justice, talk a little bit about the reporting industry and perhaps any changes in professional sports. Hopefully we get a chance to talk about a Super Bowl, and I anticipate some education, some insight, and possibly some policy ideas. So Rod, football in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic-what are the NFL’s plans for this 20-21 season? Rod Wood: Well, right now we’re full go to start the season on time, the regular season. We’ve made a lot of decisions along the way. The off-season was very different: no trainers in the building with players in the spring, the draft, as you probably all remember, was done virtually, no mini camps or OTAs, which is Organized Team Activities in the spring, no rookie mini-camp. And so we started training camp a few days ago, under very different circumstances with all the normal protections in the building: social distancing, face mask, everybody’s wearing a tracker to track their connections to any other players, coaches, et cetera. Anybody were to get the virus, we can do contact tracing the next day. Everybody gets tested, including myself, before they come in the building. I get my temperature taken four times, I’m wearing a ring to track all of my bodily activity that gets uploaded to our doctors and staff here. But all that being said, we’re in the building, we’re playing football out on the field. So far everybody’s remained healthy. I think we’re now on the day 19 without a positive test anywhere in the organization. So hopefully that continues and we can open the season on September 13th at home against the Chicago Bears. Rich Helppie: Well, that preparation is fantastic. I think that makes the Detroit Lions better prepared than most countries and probably leveraging the best of the best of technology. It seems like the NBA and the National Hockey League have done really well with their bubble approach. Major league baseball-we’ve had some successes, some setbacks. As you study those, have there been any helpful do or don’t lessons from the other major sports, and I didn’t mean to leave out soccer. Rod Wood: Well, we’re certainly watching all the sports, the ones you mentioned, even what’s going on with Indie racing and NASCAR racing and PGA Tour. All of them have similar, but in some ways, different protocols. You mentioned the bubble approach with the hockey and basketball. I think that suited their situation because they were really trying to wrap up the season that had been suspended, and they could go to a place with a much smaller number of players and coaches and have everybody together than you could ever accomplish with the football team. We did have the benefit of not having a season interrupted. All this happened during our off-season. So we were able to kind of be preparing for this season from the very beginning to be very different than any other season. The other sports unfortunately had their seasons either interrupted, or in case of baseball, delayed. I think the things that we’ve learned, our testing is very important, but testing isn’t the only thing. You still have to follow good social distancing, wear a mask, you wash your hands, be careful when you’re not in the building when you’re out in the community or home with your family or at the team hotel. And the one difference, I think with baseball that is unique in that they do travel to other cities and when they are there, they’re there for three or four days at a time. When we’re going to go on a road trip, we fly into a city at four o’clock, five o’clock on a Saturday, have a team meeting, have meals. Everybody goes to bed, we get up, have a breakfast and at 9:00 AM we’re going to the stadium. So we can kind of replicate a bubble, even when we travel. And I’ve described what we’ve done is, at least right now in training camp, we’ve created 32 bubbles, one per team. So we’re in the Detroit Lions’ bubble and the Chicago Bears are in their bubble and on and on and on. Once we get to the season, when we are traveling and playing against other teams and other cities, we have very strict travel protocols, and hopefully we continue to have very good testing results and we can maintain everybody’s health and play football and not have this spread and disrupt the season the way it has happened in baseball for a few teams. Rich Helppie: Well I’m very comforted to hear about all that preparation because I just can’t help but think about those big linemen in there, on the eighth play of a drive, they’re breathing heavily, their close quarters over and over again, every hit you’ve got body fluids and sweat, sometimes blood. It sounds risky, but it sounds like you’ve taken all the precautions possible. Did the player’s union have to get involved in crafting these rules? Rod Wood: Everything that we’re doing was negotiated between the league and the player’s association. And I think we’ve come to a very good place where the players feel incredibly safe, which is very important. And we will continue to keep them safe and hopefully not have a spread like we’ve seen in other sports and in communities that don’t have some of these protocols. And I know talking to our players and coaches, they actually feel safer in our building than they probably do at home because they know how often it’s cleaned-all the plexiglass that we put in the facility that separates every locker from one another and how we’ve handled the weight room, how we handled the meal room.