With NFL, union in COVID-19 talks, no guarantee Seahawks will start training camp on time
The Seahawks and NFL teams are scheduled to begin training camp in less than two weeks.
Will it happen?
Seattle coach Pete Carroll said last week he wants the league to delay the start of camps if it still needs to find the safest protocols for players, coaches and staff to operate daily in the coronavirus pandemic.
It still needs to find the safest protocols.
The NFL and its players union remain in negotiations that resumed Wednesday on a plan to safely start the preseason with cases of the COVID-19 virus still spiking across the country.
The NFL Players’ Association released a “heat map” on Thursday showing the NFL markets where the markets are spiking most, and least. After being mostly locked down since March, Seattle-Tacoma is where a metropolitan area wants to be on a COVID-19 heat map: in gray. The Seahawks play in what is, for now, one of the league’s coolest markets for the coronavirus, according to the NFLPA’s chart.
The message from that: wear a mask.
None of this means the Seahawks are assured of starting training camp on time July 28 at team headquarters in Renton.
The NFLPA has made counter-proposals to the league on COVID-19 safety matters that remain unresolved, 12 days before camps are to open. The players want daily testing for COVID-19. The league has had the idea of tests every three days. The players want all needless preseason games canceled, to lower risk of virus exposure and to increase the acclimation time and number of practices to get ready for the real games that are supposed to begin Sept. 10. The NFL has proposed cutting two of the four exhibitions this summer.
The union and league are also seeking an agreement on paying players who opt out of the 2020 season for virus reasons. There appears to be an agreement to keep the NFL salary cap the same per team from 2020 to 2021, despite lost revenue from this year and the likelihood of playing games in empty stadiums this fall.
The salary cap is $198.2 million per team this year. The league and union have reportedly agreed to keep it $198.2 million for 2021. That is with the NFL bracing for perhaps losing more than $5 billion in stadium revenue this coming season, according to Forbes.
But the league and union entered Thursday at odds over how players who test positive for COVID-19 will be classified on injury lists—and science, public-health experts plus what’s happened in other sports league returning to play say they absolutely will be positive cases in the NFL. Specifically, the issue is the league thinking players who test positive should be put on the non-football injury list, per a report Thursday by ESPN.
Teams are not required to pay players they put on the NFI list. The principle is clubs don’t pay for events that happen to players outside of football work that is on the team’s dime.
The players see testing positive for COVID-19, even upon reporting for the start of training camp, as events that happen on the team’s dime. The teams are requiring players to show up for the start of camps.
By Thursday evening, the players had won that fight. The league agreed to create a new COVID-19 injured-reserve list on which players testing positive will stay for three weeks—and still get paid. Negative-testing players will replace the positive players on the roster for those three weeks. That is according to NBC Sports and Pro Football Talk.
Former Seahawks All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman, now with the 49ers, is a member of the NFLPA’s executive council. Sherman reported on his Twitter account Monday: “Good meeting today with management. We were blunt and honest with them we will not compromise our players health in these discussions.”
The NFLPA reported 72 players across the league had tested positive for the virus as of Friday. That’s about 2.5% of all players.
As of Thursday the United States had positive tests in 1.1% of the total population (3.53 million reported cases, per The New York Times, for a U.S. population of 330.9 million).
Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Malik Jackson wrote last week on Instagram “it is unacceptable and utterly disrespectful for the owners to have set a camp start date of July 28, 2020 with no safety/financial guarantee agreed upon for us as players, the backbone of the industry. ...
“We (players) are sons, fathers & brothers wanting to protect our families during this unprecedented time.”
Jackson also wrote to the fact football more than any sport violates physical-distancing guidelines proven to slow and stop the spread of COVID-19.
“I can not pass Rush from 6 feet away,” Jackson wrote, “I cannot defeat a double team from 6 feet away nor can I tackle somebody from 6 feet away (to not do those things in practice, just in games is asinine).”
Other potential sticking points between the league and union appear to be going away. That includes the idea of teams putting 35% of player salaries in escrow to guard against owners’ decreased revenues this year. That was an obvious non-starter with the NFLPA.
So in that regard, the NFL is at least ahead of Major League Baseball. MLB delayed the start of its season until the end of this month over a huge dispute over how much less baseball players will get paid in their shortened 2020 season.
But with cases spiking in Florida, Arizona and California and those states—home to a total of seven NFL teams—increasing restrictions on businesses and everyday life, there is no guarantee football training camps will begin on time July 28.
This story was originally published July 16, 2020 at 9:12 AM.
