To finish season Seahawks have been told not to eat out, any guests get COVID-19 screened
If Russell Wilson wants a meal from his favorite Bellevue restaurant near his lakefront home, he needs to get that delivered. Or to-go.
Or, not at all.
If Bobby Wagner wants family members or friends to come up from his native southern California to visit him, or any other Seahawk, during this season, they’ve been told that’s not preferred — and if they must visit, they need to get tested and screened for COVID-19.
The Seahawks are under unprecedented restrictions in order to complete this unprecedented NFL season during a pandemic.
Coach Pete Carroll on Friday confirmed what a league source told The News Tribune: The Seahawks have been told not to go into restaurants to dine, or to any places of social gathering, throughout this season that is 25% complete.
“We are discouraging all of the eating out, yeah,” Carroll said.
“I hate to say that, for all the people that are trying to make their living with the restaurants and all that. But that’s just how we’ve had to do it and govern it. There’s just so much at stake, for everybody, that that’s just one of the deals that we’ve had to go with.”
The coach is all-in on the science and advice of epidemiologists and public-health officials on how to best contain the spread of the coronavirus.
“We know that gathering places is the biggest issue,” Carroll said. “Unfortunately, the restaurants that are closed in, those are really difficult settings for people — and you have masks down when you are eating, and all of that. ... so our guys have to be disciplined with that.”
The Seahawks are giving players meals prepared by the team’s dining staff to take home as alternatives to eating out.
Washington, the state with the nation’s first confirmed COVID-19 case and death in the nation, in February, remains one of its most locked-down. And the Seahawks remained one of the NFL’s most restricted teams.
Carroll also has explicitly discouraged players from having guests into their homes.
“I’ve told them: Put it on me. ‘Coach Carroll won’t let us have visitors,’ or whatever,” the coach said. “This is not that season when they get to do that.
“But if indeed there has to be somebody coming in, then we have a whole protocol we have arranged for our guys. ... As long as they let us know, we’ll take care of it. We’ll get everything cleared.”
That is: Those incoming persons must go through a testing protocol for COVID-19 before they begin their visit.
The Seahawks have set up and funded testing for that purpose in tents set up in the parking lot of the team facility in Renton.
“We’ve given them a really good format and a process so that anybody that has to come from the outside in,” Carroll said, “so that we can test people and prepare them and give them our own protocol to let anybody close to us. ...We can’t let anybody from the outside come in, until we’ve cleared them.
“We just have to maintain it. I don’t think we have to change. ...
“There are uncomfortable things that we have to do and say and hold on to, that you wouldn’t choose naturally. You have to be more concerned and more focused.
“And so, it is a great challenge of discipline and, really, diligence.”
First NFL outbreak
The New England Patriots, the Las Vegas Raiders and the Super Bowl-champion Kansas City Chiefs have had players with confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 in the last week to 10 days.
The Titans had their game against Pittsburgh postponed last week. Their game with Buffalo scheduled for Sunday has been postponed tentatively to Tuesday if the Titans have no more positive tests than the 12 players and nine team personnel already found with cases.
The Patriots had their game against Denver this weekend postponed from Sunday to Monday in the wake of quarterback Cam Newton testing positive.
The NFL this week sent teams new, enhanced COVID-19 protocols. The league also threatened the forfeiture of draft picks and games if players and team members do not comply.
People around the country, and reportedly in the league, are calling for each of the 32 teams to change. Some are calling for teams to create “local hard bubbles” of more-restricted players to avoid the outbreaks such as the one that’s shut down the Titans.
“#NFL source to me on ongoing CoVID19 positives: ‘Roughly 170 ‘Tier 1’ & ‘Tier 2’ go home every night. We need to reduce the approx 170 chances every night, times 32 teams, times 7 days a week to create an outbreak. The plan we have is a flawed plan. We need local hard bubbles,” league reporter Josina Anderson wrote Friday.
Carroll doesn’t see it that way.
He’s already put his Seahawks into what he feels is their own “bubble” to limit players’ possible expose to the COVID-19 virus that continues to sweep the nation, seven months into the pandemic.
Plus, a bubble is much more impractical to an NFL team than what has worked in the NBA and NHL to complete their seasons. NFL teams have three and four times the roster sizes of basketball and hockey. As long as the NFL travels to games, it’s impractical for teams with 53 players plus practice squads, team doctors who have practices outside the team, plus their pilots, flight crews, hotel staff and bus drivers to “bubble” together while moving around for four months.
So far, so good
It’s the ultimate knock-on-wood fact: Seattle has had zero confirmed positive cases for COVID-19 in the thousands of daily tests conducted on the Seahawks since they reported for training camp July 28.
“I don’t at this point,” the veteran coach said Friday of the league needing team bubbles, “because we have gone probably close to 60 straight days of everybody maintaining (our protocols).”
Privately, Carroll has been surprised if not shocked at the Seahawks’ success one-fourth into the season at keeping the virus away from the team.
Science, and math, say a representative sample of any walk of American life — particularly a group of 53 players on an active NFL roster plus 16 practice-squad players, a dozen or so more on injured reserve plus 70 or so coaches and team personnel that are traveling on buses and planes and staying hotels to play games this weekend — would have at least one positive case by now.
“Now ... the odds just, they continue to grow that it gets more difficult, you know. It doesn’t get easier. It probably gets more difficult. Just more variables that can enter in,” Carroll said. “But, we’ve had great communication with our guys. They have expressed how they are doing it and how they are making it in their living setup. And we have no reason not to trust that they get it. Now we just have to say with it.
“This is a bubble, of sorts. That’s how we’re living it.”
Carroll is calling on his player to maintain their self-discipline about adhering to what’s worked so far in not interacting with others outside their homes and daily testing circles.
“What has to happen is, our awareness and our attentiveness have to be on, so that we don’t allow somebody to get into us,” he said.
Wilson and Wagner have talked of how they as the team captains and other veteran players such as longest-tenured Seahawk K.J. Wright have led the messaging to teammates to not go out.
“I think discipline is going to be the biggest thing, understanding that we aren’t really going to be able to do the things that we normally do,” Wagner said at the start of this season. “And we have to think about not just ourselves but our families, other people’s families, and understand that if we do something reckless or something that goes against what we are trying to do, that doesn’t just affect your family. That affects everybody else. ...
“At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of self-discipline.”
The All-Pro middle linebacker joked it wouldn’t be as hard for 20-something NFL players to not go out in Seattle as it might be in, say, Los Angeles, New York or Miami.
“Luckily, we are in Seattle, so there aren’t really any clubs or things of that nature that ... you know, to go out to,” Wagner said.
For all they’ve already done, Wagner, Carroll and the Seahawks know there is so much more to do.
“We’ve finished one-quarter of the season,” Carroll said Friday, chuckling at all that’s still left to do.
“We are just getting going.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2020 at 8:51 AM.
