UW Huskies out of Pac-12 championship game due to ongoing COVID-19 issues
Washington had zero offensive linemen available to play this week.
If you’re looking for reasons the Huskies had to bow out of Friday’s Pac-12 championship game, that’s a good place to start. To play a game, the Pac-12 requires a minimum of at least 53 scholarship players — including seven scholarship offensive linemen, one scholarship quarterback and four scholarship defensive linemen.
The full elimination of one of those groups — due to a combination of COVID-19 positive tests and contact-tracing protocols — was enough to disqualify the Huskies on its own. But the Pac-12 announced on Monday that UW also didn’t meet the threshold for scholarship athletes.
The Huskies also had to cancel last week’s game against Oregon, which would have decided the Pac-12 North champion. Instead, UW won the division by default because it had the highest winning percentage (.750) in the division.
Oregon will replace UW in the title game against USC, the South Division champion. UW head coach Jimmy Lake said there was no scenario where the Huskies would have been able to play.
“Our offensive line is completely gone,” Lake said during a Zoom call on Monday. “We cannot play and we cannot practice. … Our offensive line is completely unavailable until the following week. There is no way we could wait (and see) at all. We cannot play football. We couldn’t play football last week and we cannot play football this week.”
How it happened
Rob Scheidegger, UW’s Associate AD for Health and Wellness, said the Huskies saw their first “single, isolated cases” before the game against Utah on Nov. 28. UW works closely with the COVID response and prevention unit on campus and public health to track cases, but there was nothing that specifically linked the cases together.
There were more isolated cases ahead of the Stanford game on Dec. 5, but no more than one case over a day. The health team was able to contact trace and isolate, allowing UW to play the game. There were several players missing from the sideline during the loss.
The Huskies saw the jump in cases on Tuesday of last week. They haven’t practiced since that Wednesday. There have also been positive cases among the athletic department staff, and the entire team is currently in isolation. Lake said team members that have tested positive have mild symptoms — “Nothing extremely serious.”
“We wanted to be able to take some time to figure out where these cases were coming from because we know that’s the only way to stop the spread of this virus,” Scheidegger said. “I would say Tuesday of this past week is when we sort of started to really take a stop.
“At that point, the reason why we were being super proactive is we wanted to be able to play against Oregon and obviously we wanted to be able to play moving forward. But we wanted to do that the right way. We knew that in order to be able to safely do that we needed to be able to stop the spread of the virus within our team.”
Scheidegger said players haven’t yet been cleared to return to the footprint to prepare for games. The whole team will be tested again on Tuesday.
The game against Oregon was the first time the Huskies had to cancel a game or pause football activities due to COVID-19 protocols. They did have two games — Cal and Washington State — canceled due to issues in those programs.
“We know there are cases everywhere right now,’’ Scheidegger said. “The most effective way to prevent continued spread is to isolate positive cases — identify them as quickly as possible and isolate them. We reached a point where we couldn’t continue to do that.
“Then, as Coach Lake alluded to, we actually have one position group — because of that approach — that is completely unavailable to our team for play this weekend. We’re just going to have to move forward, have a couple of days of negative cases so that we can feel good that when we bring student-athletes into our footprint that they’re not bringing the virus back with them.”
It’s the policy of the athletic department not to release positive cases specific to a single sport. New numbers for all student-athletes will be released on Wednesday evening, as usual. Last Wednesday, there were 11 positive active cases among all student-athletes and UW had administered 5,950 tests with 64 total positive cases since June 15.
“This virus is just spreading across the whole country,” Lake said. “It’s spreading across the whole country and it seems like it doesn’t pick where it’s going to go and where it doesn’t go. It goes everywhere.
“Our guys did a fantastic job and they continue to do a good job of doing all the stuff our medical team has advised them to do. Unfortunately, this virus is just wicked. It’s extremely infectious. We are seeing that right now. We had been seeing that for months now with other teams that have felt the veracity of this thing.”
What’s next?
The News Tribune spoke to Scheidegger in October about the long-term concerns of a COVID-19 diagnosis, including inflammation in the heart and muscle lining of some patients. Scheidegger said then that UW created a required process for athletes that are diagnosed with COVID-19. Along with a cardiac work-up, athletes are continually monitored for complications that have been identified .
Dr. Jonathan Drezner, who is the team physician for the Seattle Seahawks and the director of the UW Medicine Center for Sports Cardiology, is also a UW team physician.
“They put together essentially a series of tests,’’ Scheidegger said, ‘’from monitoring that’s done with some blood work for some markers that could be suggestive of cardiac inflammation to Echo and cardiac MRI and all these different things.
“We have great resources here so we’re able to put together a plan that we utilize for every student-athlete who tests positive for COVID-19 or potentially tests positive for COVID-19 down the road or has antibodies so we know that they’ve been exposed to the virus themselves when they show up on campus.”
Lake said the Huskies’ goals are always the same: win the Pac-12 and win a bowl game. Since they can’t do the first, they’re setting their sights on the second. To play in a bowl game, they need to return to the practice field. That requires two straight days of zero positive COVID-19 cases.
“Until that point, we won’t be able to practice,” Lake said. “We will have a bunch of guys coming off of quarantine and guys that did test positive a couple of weeks ago will be out of isolation. We know we’ll be able to get those guys back.”
Lake said UW likely won’t be able to fully return to the practice field until the week of Dec. 26, so it’s unlikely the Huskies would be able to play another game before a potential bowl game. The Alamo Bowl, which takes place on Dec. 29, seems like a likely destination for UW. Lake said the Huskies would need “three to four days” to practice before a game.
“Hopefully we have some negative results and we can get everybody back in this building,” Lake said. “Then we’d have more than seven days to prepare for a possible Dec. 29 bowl game. I feel very, very confident that we’ll be able to do that.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 11:05 AM.
