Pete Carroll surprised: Seahawks to Atlanta and back, and still no positive COVID-19 tests
The most important, decisive development of this unprecedented NFL season so far isn’t, wow, the Seahawks finally let Russell Wilson cook.
It’s not Tom Brady throwing two interceptions in his first game for Tampa Bay after 20 years of doing pretty much everything better than anyone ever has for New England.
And it’s not the 49ers losing, the Cardinals winning and the Rams opening their billion-dollar palace outside L.A.
It’s the huge win the Seahawks—and every one of the league’s other 15 teams that played on the road last weekend—returned with:
No positive tests for COVID-19.
Friday marked the seventh day since the Seahawks left the relative bubble of their team facility and their home or hotel rooms, boarded a bus then a plane, boarded another bus, then stayed two nights in a hotel in Atlanta. They played for more than three hours banging into the Falcons, then showered and dressed in a locker room foreign to them, got on another bus and back on their chartered plane to fly home. The drivers for the buses and plane and the hotel in the Buckhead section of Atlanta were staffed by people outside the team’s testing and precautions protocols.
Through all of that, 53 players on Seattle’s active roster plus 16 more of its practice squad were tested on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in the COVID-19 trailers in the players’ parking lot. Plus, the team flew two of the laboratory technicians it has working in those trailers each day to Atlanta to provide team testing at the hotel the day before the opening game. That’s more than 400 tests for the players this week alone since the day before and then after they beat the Falcons. The only day they didn’t test was on game day.
The Seahawks had zero positive tests. Again.
It’s the ultimate knock-on-wood statistic: The Seahawks have had zero true positive tests in the seven-plus weeks since daily testing began at the start of training camp. Wide receiver John Ursua had a false-positive in August. Two subsequent negative tests in a row confirmed that.
Pete Carroll is more excited and relieved about this than his team winning in Atlanta. Because it means more to whether the Seahawks and the league can finish the season.
Carroll turned 69 this week. He’s the oldest, and in that regard, anyway, most at-risk coach in the league during this pandemic season.
Minutes after his team’s win in Atlanta last weekend, Carroll remarked he won’t be able to say the trip was a success until he learned of the coming week’s COVID test results.
Now, he knows.
“Yeah, it’s a really big deal,” Carroll said Friday, after the last full practice before Seattle plays its home opener against the New England Patriots in primetime at CenturyLink Field.
Instead of 68,000 fanatics fully lubricated and at full throttle packing under the cantilevered roofs to create perhaps the league’s most effective home-field advantage, the stadium in downtown Seattle will be empty because of the coronavirus.
“This is kind of late stage two of the process of figuring it out,” Carroll said. “You know, we’ve figured out (training) camp. Our guys did a marvelous job, all the people that contributed to the process and procedure to get that done. Camp was fantastic.
“Then we went on the road for the first time. There’s a ton of stuff that you’ve got to go through to orchestrate that thing. And we orchestrated it, where we made it all the way through to here we are, on Friday, with all negative tests again.
“So that’s a major accomplishment.”
What’s next
Carroll says the next week will be key to determine if the NFL can indeed pull this off: a 17-week, 16-game regular season played in its entirety with no disruptions nor large groups of players testing positive and having to go into a multi-week isolation.
“This weekend here, with our first chance of being at home (for a game) and being in town, that still adds some newness to (it), with where we are coming and going and all that,” Carroll said.
That includes the hotel in the eastside Seattle suburbs the team checks into the night before home games. That’s to have meetings and get everyone focused on the game.
“We’ve got to make it through that, too,” Carroll said. “And we won’t know until the end of next week if we are able to handle that. If we can make it through these three stages we’re going to be—first, I’ll be really proud of that, that everybody in the organization has figured it out, the players complied and the coaches complied in fashion—and that will let us know that we know how to do this.”
The coach said from there through the rest of the season, it will be on the “discipline and the care that we take to it.”
That refers to the peer pressure and leadership captains Bobby Wagner and Russell Wilson, in particular, are exerting on teammates to do the right thing to complete this season. No going on to restaurants with friends. No hanging out at picnics and other social gatherings of people who aren’t getting tested for the virus pretty much every day as they are.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of self-discipline,” Wagner said this summer.
Wagner joked about the local nightlife helping the Seahawks stay COVID-free.
“Luckily, we are in Seattle, so there aren’t really any clubs or things of that nature that...you know, to go out to,” the All-Pro linebacker said.
The numbers
The testing results across the entire league have been surprising.
College football had more canceled games this week, including Houston at Baylor and Florida Atlantic at Georgia Southern. Major League Baseball teams such as the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals have had to cancel entire series because of positive tests, as they fly around the nation for road games.
The NFL? The league announced the results for COVID-19 testing from Sept. 6-12, the latter being the day before 15 of the 16 season-opening games. Teams had 40,479 tests given to 7,437 players, coaches and team personnel last week. There were two new, confirmed positive tests among players, and five confirmed positives among other team personnel.
That’s 0.09% of all tests in the NFL that came back positive.
The league and its players’ union set new roster rules for this season in anticipation of positive tests cutting into team’s ability to play each Sunday. They expanded practice squads from 10 to 12 then to 16 players. They expanded the game-day rosters from 53 to a maximum of 55 by allowing each team sign one or two players off that expanded practice squad onto the active roster for each game.
The rules on injured reserve also have changed. Instead of players on IR being out for the season, and only two able to possibly be designated to return after eight weeks, IR players can in 2020 return after three weeks. That covers the recommended time of quarantines and re-testing of players who test positive for COVID-19. But the new three-week IR rules applies to all injuries.
The league braced in training camp for 5% as the threshold of positive cases to decide whether to continue daily testing for the virus. Instead, the positivity rate across the league has been 0.5%.
There was talk the NFL would thus reduce testing frequency. But teams howled at what a bad idea that would be. The predominent thought remains: this system of daily testing is working, fantastically, so don’t change it. So the league hasn’t. The testing each morning—the results flown each day by chartered jets to testing labs in Burbank, California, and New Jersey for results to get back to teams within 10-18 hours—will continue indefinitely.
Asked if he was surprised at the lack of positive results, Carroll said: “A little bit, yeah.
“We didn’t know what to expect. We had a couple indications, with what (in) baseball had happened. Early, they had some issues.
“By the way, we haven’t made it through here. We’ve got to get through, everybody’s got to get through the first couple weeks—on the road and at home—to figure out their process and how it works and how it fits.
“Yeah, I think I’m surprised, in general, there are so few positive tests happening around the league, with all the people that are test. It does show you, though, that the focus of testing every day has really brought our attention to the details that it takes to pull this off.
“I think that’s a big part of it.”
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 4:29 PM.
