Pete Carroll favors delaying start of Seahawks, NFL training camps for COVID-19 if need be
Pete Carroll wants an appropriate amount of time to prepare his players for a safe start of football season.
That’s at least six weeks, he has said.
But more urgently, he wants an appropriate amount of time to safeguard NFL players, coaches and staff from the coronavirus that has been spiking again across much of the country.
The Seahawks coach said he is in favor of delaying the start of training to camp to get the league’s testing, tracing and safe-distancing protocols exactly right. Carroll made the comments Friday on the team’s flagship radio station, KIRO AM in Seattle.
The Seahawks and the league are scheduled to begin training camp July 28. Asked by 710 ESPN host John Clayton where things stood for the start of camp, Carroll sighed.
Then he brought up the idea of delaying camps starting.
“Well, what a challenging time,” the coach said. “We are all in, and we are going through it. … This is a major undertaking that we are preparing for. Camp is just around the corner, with the start time it appears to be that we are heading towards. There’s such a tremendous amount of uncertainty. …
“What we are finding is, the whole idea is to protect our people. How can we protect our players, their families, our coaches and their families, all of the people that support as we go through the process of unveiling a football season? There is so much that goes into it. And the thing that I am feeling is, right now, we would like all the information that we can get. We want to be as smart as we can as we make these choices and decisions as we move forward.
“And if we need more time to get it done, I hope that we’ll take it. If we need to postpone the start of camp coming up … and we could use that to our advantage, I think we should do it.”
Carroll said he hasn’t heard anyone in the league talking about delaying the start of training camps past July 28.
“But I could see us just waiting a little bit,” he said.
“We’ll see what happens.”
NBA, MLB delayed NFL learning
The Seahawks’ medical and training staffs, state and county public-health authorities and the league are working — seemingly “24 hours a day,” Carroll said — to put in place effective protocols in testing, then contract tracing and tracking of COVID-19 virus cases.
The re-starts of the NBA, Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball seasons show what science and statistics say: inevitably there will be positive COVID-19 cases in the NFL when teams begin training camp.
The NFL is flying more blindly about starting camps and the season than the league thought it would be by mid-July. Decision makers in pro football were counting on the NBA and MLB to have re-started their seasons by now. But the NBA just got to its “bubble” in Orlando, Fla., last week to begin preparing for a season that will begin after NFL camps are supposed to open. Baseball squandered months arguing over money to play its pandemic-shortened season. That sport will finally restart games July 23.
“We were really counting on learning a lot from the NBA, as they start up. But their start has been somewhat delayed; they are just getting going now,” Carroll said. “Baseball is underway now, but they’ve had somewhat of a slower start. We were hoping to learn, you know, as they went through their process.”
Carroll said this spring he believes coaches and staffs need five to six weeks to safely prepare players for the start of an NFL season, which he has called “the most rigorous of events.”
“I know that our guys need six weeks of work to get rolling, and that’s what the league has always allowed us. A couple weeks, then four (preseason) games—it takes a full five, six weeks in camp,” Carroll said in late April.
And, Carroll noted, that’s coming off a normal, full offseason of weight training then practices on the field in organized team activities (OTAs) and minicamps from April through June. None of that happened this year. Team facilities across the league remained closed to players from mid-March because of the coronavirus. They are scheduled to open for the first time since then for camps starting in two weeks.
The Seahawks are scheduled to open the full season the league remains intent of playing Sept. 13 at Atlanta. The scheduled start of training camp is six weeks and five days before that opening game.
If the NFL were to delay the start of training camps, it would have to be only for a week or so to still fit within Carroll’s stated required time to safely prepare players for a season.
Then again, as Carroll said Friday on the radio: “Everybody is in an adaptation mode. Everybody is having to adjust, in all phases of our lives: work lives, personal, everything that we are doing. Family — all of our family stuff has just been...everybody has to be in the mode of being flexible and adjusting to the times and the information that we have.”
Much to settle
The NFL and its players’ union were reportedly meeting Monday virtually to discuss issues with the start of training camp and the season. Those include the league’s idea of 35% of each player’s salary for 2020 going into an escrow account to help offset the estimated $5 billion in losses teams will take if the season happens with no fans in stadiums, and the option for concerned players to opt out of playing this season.
“It’s just a lot going on,” Carroll said. “So hopefully we are going to do this really well.”
The league wants to play only two of the usual four preseason games to get ready. The players’ union wants to play none of them.
The union wants to use the day of exhibition games and the one or two days of rest after each of them for more acclimation, training and practice time for the real season. The players don’t want to risk unnecessarily exposing themselves more than they already will be to the possibility of getting the virus by playing games that don’t count.
“The start of the season is such a long ways away for us, at this point. And we are all going through this together. It’s all going to be relative,” Carroll said. “The competitiveness aspect of this is going to be equal as we go through it.
“But right now, if we needed to take a step back and keep drawing information...it seems like we learn so much every couple days. There is so much information coming in. Whatever we need to do to do this right, this is what I hope we do. ...
“Right now, if we’ve got to slow down a little bit to get started, that would be OK. There’s a lot of unsettled issues right now between the league and the players. We don’t know exactly how camp’s going to be and all of that. We are trying to make those decisions, and as we zero in on it, as we gain all the information, we need to do this as well as possible so we can put out a great product and put our best foot forward.
“So if we’ve got to postpone then, whatever.”
You can listen to the entire interview between Carroll on Clayton here:
This story was originally published July 13, 2020 at 8:32 AM.
