Fate and the 2020 NFL Draft

Like many of you, this Covid-19 virus has turned pretty much everything upside down. I touched on how the draft will bring a bit of normalcy earlier this week, but l wanted to reflect on what was originally the plans for this draft weekend and how a single announcement and fate saved me from a lot of hassle.

After watching from afar as the draft went to Philly, Chicago and Nashville, I got the bright idea to try and head out to Las Vegas this year with some friends and knock an item off my bucket list. I am very familiar with the city, having attended the annual CES convention in January for many years, so I ma used to being around a boatload of people and having prices sky high.

Move forward to late last summer, and we had our group all committed to attending and we were in the process of waiting on the booking window for airfare and accommodations to open up to cement our trip. That's when things started going sideways. One of the original foursome was worried about his job and was looking to buy a house, so he pulled out. Fine, we would go with three. Nope, another one lets me know that his wife had scheduled to be out of town on a girls weekend the same time (mind you we had this penciled in the books for months prior to this) so that pretty much gave our #4 the excuse needed to back out as well. They all wanted to go to Cleveland in 2021 instead (WTF is there to do in Cleveland in late April?) because of cost and proximity, so we ended up scrapping our plans prior to anyone committing financially.

At this point, I was pretty much relegated to the fact that Vegas wasn't happening, and Cleveland in 2021 was gonna be the bucket list checkmark. Then my wife surprised me in early January and offered for just the two of us to go, or meet up with fellow Grey Manes partner Brent and his wife. This rekindled the idea and I was ready to pull the trigger on the airfare when two things happened in rapid succession. The NFL announced the official dates of the draft (which were "known", but not official) on January 21st, and then the Covid-19 rumblings started up a few weeks later. The announcement of the dates triggered the events that led to fate keeping me from having to deal with a whole lot of crap to cancel my plans.

As soon as the NFL announcement confirming the dates hit, the next day the flights in and out of Las Vegas that route through my city doubled, literally while I was looking at them. What was once around $450 round trip Non-Stop suddenly was pushing $800 bucks. Not wanting to pull the trigger during high demand, I waited to see if there would be some reductions in the coming weeks before I committed to that much for two tickets for us. At that point, fate intervened and Covid-19 rumblings, shutdown rumors and impacts started dominating the news cycle. Once that started, the decision to cancel completely without having invested any money was made, and Cleveland in 2021 or possibly even Las Vegas again in 2022 will be the next goal.