Pete Carroll: NFL protocols for opening amid COVID-19 puts testing, questions on Seahawks
The NFL has developed protocols on how they want players and teams to begin training camp and reopen next month.
But what about the most important aspect of that first leap for football since the coronavirus pandemic shut down the league in mid-March: the testing of players, coaches and staff for COVID-19?
That’s up to the Seahawks and each team to figure out.
“That’s a huge area,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “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, that’s because it is. If it sounds like it’s possible one team may test more above the league’s minimum requirements 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.
Will every team test every player every day? Will, for example, Russell Wilson get tested daily? How feasible is that? If not, will teams just do the minimum required testing? Will a player who is negative the required day he is tested go the next day or more without being tested, and thus could in theory and science become positive that next day while going undetected until his next required test?
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.”
The NFL needs plans for how to quarantine players that 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 positive players? 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.
Then there’s the near-certainty players will test positive for COVID-19 at some point after the NFL reopens. It’s not as if the pandemic is going away just because football is starting. And there still is no vaccine to assure any player —anyone — won’t get the virus in the coming months.
The league is discussing the possibility of expanding the practice squads, again.
The NFL and its new collective bargaining agreement approved by its players’ union in March, just before the pandemic shut down the country, calls for practice squads to increase from 10 to 12 players this year. Now there’s talk of possibly having 16 players on it in 2020, according to NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo Wednesday.
That would raise the chances a team might keep a fourth quarterback around on the practice squad and set aside as a “quarantine” QB stowed away supposedly safely, just in case. Tampa Bay’s Bruce Arians is one coach who has mentioned this idea.
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 league 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.
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
