Ezekiel Elliott positive test in Dallas shows issues NFL, Seahawks are facing in opening
Quandre Diggs isn’t flashy. He’ll gladly and politely answer questions when asked, but he doesn’t advertise a ton about himself.
He doesn’t seem like a guy who revels in saying, “I told you so.”
But ... well, he told us so.
Last month, the Seahawks’ safety was talking from his home in Austin, Texas, on a remote Zoom call, the way of the COVID-19 world. He voiced caution and concern about his home state resuming mostly normal business operations amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think our governor (Greg Abbott) has opened up the state a little too fast,” Diggs said May 21 from Austin, while cases of the COVID-19 virus were still substantial and rising in Texas and elsewhere.
“I think that we have (a) rise in cases. ... You know what I mean? It’s not like it’s getting better. We might’ve flattened the curve a little bit, but we still have spikes in cases.
“I think we are just doing a little too much right now.
“But, we’ve just got to roll with it, and we’ve got to keep ourselves safe even though the governor is not going to do it.”
Diggs’ words rang true Monday.
News came out of Texas that Dallas star running back Ezekiel Elliott was among multiple players for the Cowboys and the Houston Texans who reportedly have tested positive for COVID-19. A source told Clarence Hill and Mac Engel of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Elliott took the test for COVID-19 last week and the results came back positive.
A source told the Star-Telegram the only reason the three-time Pro Bowl running back and 2016 All-Pro took a test for COVID-19 was because a friend had tested positive. Elliott had no symptoms, a source told the Star-Telegram.
NFL Network reported “several” Cowboys tested positive for the virus that as of Tuesday had more than 2.12 million positive cases in the United States with more than 116,500 deaths.
Texans players also have tested positive for COVID-19, the Houston Chronicle and other outlets reported Monday.
The Cowboys and Texans who tested positive reportedly have not been inside team facilities.
The University of Houston had to stop its voluntary practices for student-athletes last weekend after six of them tested positive following their return to campus.
The positive tests of Dallas’ and Houston’s players shows how complicated the opening of NFL training camps next month — and the restart of every pro and college sports league in America — will be.
Leagues and teams are developing plans for routine testing of players upon their return and as they practice. Leagues need plans for how to quarantine players who test positive. How will those players be set apart from teammates while still remaining in the “bubble” of team control? Will teams get roster exemptions for those players who test positive? Will teams be able to have meetings indoors, per usual? How does a team implement social distancing in a locker room with 90 players?
Are linemen going to banging into each other along the line of scrimmage hundreds of times each day, or even bumping into each other in no-pads drills with blocking cushions?
What about travel, hotel stays, fans or no fans or some fans in the stands, plus all the related issues of starting a season during a pandemic? No one in the U.S. has done it yet.
“That’s a huge area,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said when asked about how he’s going to social distance his team in the pandemic. “We are trying to stay abreast of this whole topic.
“The league will have their protocols. They’ve already shown us the structure. We already adopted the protocols for our coaches returning to the facility, and all that.
“I hope that we are intending to do this as well as it can be done, and make sure that we make all the testing available as we go. Because, really, without the testing part of it and identifying somebody that might be asymptomatic person that can transfer the infection, we really don’t know anything.
“So we have to really be in tune with testing.”
By “we,” Carroll means the Seahawks, specifically. He says the NFL’s return-to-play protocols leave the decisions on testing players up to individual teams.
“Each club has the opportunity to do that as they choose, within the guidelines of the protocols,” Carroll said. “It does come back to the clubs to make the final decision of how you put things in, and the state, also, to allow us the guidelines to move forward.”
If this sounds like unchartered territory — if it sounds like it’s possible that one team may test more than another, and one team could have more positive tests and thus more sidelined players simply because it is testing more—well, that’s because it is.
Carroll intimated the Seahawks are going to be one of the teams that will test more.
“We are going to be very, very, very protective of our players in the environment and making sure we are doing the right thing,” the coach said. “I’m not going to tell you all the stuff we are going to do, because I don’t want to give our stuff away right now, because we are still trying to figure it out.”
Suffice to say, the standards of player, coaches and staff safety are anything but assured as the NFL tries to open in time for training camps in late July.
The Cowboys have for weeks been in the process of reopening their team facility in the Dallas suburbs to coaches and other staff members, but not players. The NFL has yet to allow players in team buildings. The league closed the facilities in mid-March as the pandemic was spreading nationwide.
The only NFL players who have been permitted inside team headquarters this spring have been those rehabilitating with trainers from injuries and surgeries.
Texas, with a population of 29 million, has gone from about 50,000 cases of COVID-19 in mid-May around the time Diggs voiced his concerns to 89,108 cases and 1,983 deaths as of Tuesday. That is according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Washington (with about a fourth of Texas’ residents, at 7.6 million) had 25,834 cases and 1,217 deaths from the virus as of Tuesday.
Washington was an early national leader in cases and deaths. But with some of the most aggressive social-distancing and business restrictions in the country, chiefly in the Seahawks’ King County, Washington’s cases and deaths have decreased.
King County remains one of the nation’s more restricted counties. It is in a modified Phase 1 of Washington’s four-phase Safe Start opening plan.
Last week Gov. Jay Inslee said pro sports could resume practicing in Washington, regardless of a county’s phase. But, again, the NFL has not permitted players back to team buildings and likely won’t until training camps begin. That is supposed to be July 28 for the Seahawks, at their Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton.
This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 12:46 PM.
