It’s not as easy as just ‘let’s play games again’ — especially for the Seahawks, NFL
It’s not as easy as just “Let’s start playing the games again.”
Particularly in football.
The NFL on Thursday told teams to expect to begin training camp on time next month and then a season on time Sept. 10 amid the coronavirus pandemic.
On the same day, the U.S. set its new high in reported coronavirus cases: 39,972.
Three-time Pro Bowl defensive back and twice Super Bowl champion Malcolm Jenkins is the latest player to say he’s not comfortable with that.
Jenkins, a contributor for CNN, explained on the television news network Thursday how his league is in a more challenging situation playing its games than the NBA is in restarting its basketball season “in a bubble” of isolation at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, next month. Players in that league such as Kyrie Irving have questioned the wisdom of restarting a basketball season amid a surge in COVID-19 cases in relatively open Florida, and during the racial-equality movement across the country.
Jenkins and others in the NFL believe there could be even less wisdom in playing pro football games.
There are inherent reasons restarting football in particularly tricky:
- Containing NFL players in a “bubble” to play, as the NBA or NHL plan to do, is not feasible. The maximum number of players on an NBA roster is 15. In the NFL, it’s 65. That’s 53 football players per 32 teams, plus at least 12 players on a practice squad.
- Cootball’s very nature violates every intent of social distancing and efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 that is surging again in the U.S. Every play, in every practice and game, involves physical, close-quarters battling, slamming into other men, sweating and spitting and grunting and yelling at each other .... you get the picture.
Jenkins—a father and a son—sure does.
“The NBA is a lot different than the NFL, because they can actually quarantine all of their players, or however is going to participate, where we have over 2,000 players, even more coaches and staff. We can’t do that,” Jenkins said Thursday on CNN. “So we end up being on kind of this trust system, the honor system, where we just have to hope that guys are social distancing and things like that. That puts all of us at risk—not only us as players and who is in the (team) building, but when you go home to your families.
“I have parents that I don’t want to get sick.”
Yes, Jenkins reminds us that professional athletes are people, too.
Sports absolutely can provide positives the nation truly needs right now: a sense of normalcy, community (though fans are unlikely to be at games for a while at least) and an outlet.
But at what risk?
Sports may be worth the risk for fans that want to be entertained. The pragmatic question in the leagues becomes: Are playing games again right now — in a society that lacks a vaccine for COVID-19 or still even common, reliable testing on par with the world’s most-tested countries — worth the possible risk to those who have the most to lose?
The players?
“I think until we get to the point that we have protocols in place, until we get to the place as a country where we feel safe doing it, we have to understand football is a non-essential business,” Jenkins said. “And so we don’t need to do it. So the risk, you know, has to be, really, eliminated before I would feel comfortable with going back.”
Science says elite athletes in the prime of their physical lives are not likely to die from COVID-19. But they can become unknowing, asymptomatic carriers. What about the 60-year-old referee who talks with and at times separates players after every play of every game? What about the older person who holds down and line-to-gain markers along the sidelines, standing a few feet from players along the sideline for more than three hours?
Players who become infected risk spreading the virus to more vulnerable people that are at every NFL game — for any game at every sport, for that matter. And that’s even if there are no fans in the stands, as seems likely this NFL season.
How empty will stadiums be?
On Thursday, league owners approved teams putting tarps over the first rows of seats behind each team’s sideline for games. Even if fans are allowed by the league and local public-healthy polices to be in attendance at games this fall, they won’t be in the seats nearest the players.
Part of the move is player safety. Part of it is to create a new revenue stream, to offset owners’ huge losses in in-stadium cash this season. ESPN reported that Renie Anderson, the NFL’s executive vice president of NFL partnerships and chief revenue officer, told teams they could sell advertising on those tarps that will cover the lower seats — and be on television screens during every play.
At the very least, there will not be full stadiums this season. Agent reportedly have been told the league stands to lose up to $3 billion this year if it plays games in empty stadiums.
But the NFL, though non-essential, generates more than $8 billion in revenue annually in a non-pandemic year.
So, yes, the league is planning to play.
Just not the first game.
The NFL and Pro Football Hall of Fame announced Thursday the annual Hall of Fame exhibition game and the weekend of events surrounding the enshrinement of the class of 2020 is canceled. It was supposed to be Aug. 6-9 in Canton, Ohio.
The league had already been considering canceling two of each team’s four preseason games in August, to better concentrate training camps and acclimation for the regular season to begin on time.
Each NFL team facility including the Seahawks’ in Renton has been closed by the pandemic since mid-March. Players have not had any of the organized team activities (OTAs) and minicamps they normally have in May and June on practice fields. Players and coaches have instead held virtual training calls online via Zoom during the last month. Those just ended.
Lacking that usual offseason team workouts, the league had been considering having players report a couple weeks early to training camp, in mid July.
But the six weeks from mid-June to the start of training camps will remain a time for vacation and the last down time before the preseason and season are scheduled to begin.
The Seahawks remain scheduled to report to training camp July 28, provided Gov. Jay Inslee’s recent decree that pro sports could practice and play games in front of no fans in Washington remains in effect by then.
Testing ‘a huge area’
NFL executive vice president and general counsel Jeff Pash said the league told its teams Thursday to expect an on-time start for training camps next month. Pash told reporters on a conference call Thursday the NFL is having “active discussions” on the protocols and procedures that will happen after players and coaches report to their training camps at the end of July, according to ESPN.
Coach Pete Carroll said this month the league was leaving many of the details of testing up to the Seahawks and each team.
“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.”
“That’s a huge area,” Carroll said of testing. “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.”
This month the NFL issued to teams a 13-page instruction guide for social-distancing protocols and other efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 inside team facilities once they open for training camp and the season. They include dividing team employees into three tiers based on their need to interact face to face with players in the locker room and on the practice field each day, ESPN reported.
Tier one is for the team personnel who interact personally with players the most. The league is limiting that tier to 60 people. It’s up to the teams to decide which 60 employees. Those tier-one people will be screened and tested most often for COVID-19 among the three tiers of team personnel.
Welcome to NFL football in a pandemic.
NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills said Thursday the league has not yet finalized coronavirus testing, screening and treatment protocol for teams. The league reportedly has been considering requiring testing of every player on the active roster for COVID-19 every three days.
Sills said the league and the NFL Players Association would set up “a very ambitious testing program, one that will attempt to keep everyone in the team environment as safe as possible. That includes not only players, but also coaches, staff and everyone who will be together.”
So perhaps Carroll and the Seahawks won’t be totally on their own in the theory and approach to testing, just its practical, daily application.
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 10:03 AM.
