Now comes the most treacherous week of the Seahawks’ COVID-19 season: time off in the bye
In a normal year — that is, every one in the history of the NFL except this one — the bye week is the Seahawks’ in-season equivalent of spring break.
Players race from the team facility in Renton the day after their game as if the building were on fire. Coach Pete Carroll gives them from Monday to the following Monday off. It’s longer than the bye break mandated by the league’s collective bargaining agreement. And the players love it.
Many go to Las Vegas, Hawaii, Mexico, The Bahamas, Tahiti, home for school homecomings — anywhere but staying around Seattle.
But this is 2020. As you might have noticed, nothing is normal this year.
This bye week, the players and coaches aren’t fleeing Western Washington. Monday morning they were trudging back into team headquarters, into the trailers set up in the players’ parking lot for more daily COVID-19 testing.
Carroll’s message to his players this bye week isn’t “be safe, have fun, see you next week.”
It’s “remember: Always protect the team.”
“Yeah, we have to be so, so tuned in,” Carroll said Monday, the day after Seattle’s 27-26 victory over Minnesota improved the Seahawks to 5-0 for the first time in franchise history.
“Remember, always protect the team is No. 1 This is what this week is about. That rule is all about conscience, staying connected to team, your players, who you represent, all that.”
The coach did not downplay how important it was for the players, while not practicing and mostly being out of the team facility this week, to stay out of restaurants. Don’t host guests or meet those who you haven’t informed us about, so they can get COVID tested first, too.
Carroll installed those rules at the start of training camp. They’ve worked.
While the Tennessee Titans have had two dozen cases and the league has had to postpone and reschedule games affecting about a fourth of the NFL the last two weeks, the Seahawks in still-very-restricted Washington have had zero confirmed positive tests. Those among the thousands of daily cotton-swab tests they’ve had in almost three full months of daily COVID-19 testing.
“Everything is at stake,” Carroll said of this bye week like no other in this season like no other. “I mean, why it’s such a big deal is that we’re out of our normal routine. We can’t practice this one. This is the first time. We just got to do it.
“I love practice, being prepared, having the mentality for it. This has just got to carry over from all the time we’ve had. Our guys will test every day in the morning. I’m kind of hoping that our guys will work out and be around the facility, do their thing in a fashion so that it’s somewhat normal, because we’re entering a new week.”
Yes, this is no bye week for rest and relaxation for the league’s oldest coach. Carroll, 69, is worried. He will be from now until the team begins preparing a week from now for its game at Arizona Oct. 25.
Really, he’s going to be worried until there is a proven vaccine and this pandemic subsides. Well past the end of this season.
“I’m concerned about guys making errors, the error in their ways,” Carroll said of this Seahawks bye week. “They run into the wrong people, go to the wrong place, they get themselves vulnerable. We change the bubble effect of what we’ve been creating here, working so hard to keep.
“It’s all about conscience. We’ll do everything we can to remind them. The players are going to work at it amongst themselves, all that, with real direction. Real crucial.
“Hopefully, we’ll be able to pull it off.”
Fans?
CenturyLink Field again was as quiet as a production set for the latest Seahawks thriller Sunday night. The COVID-19 virus is prohibiting fans from attending games in Seattle. The result is a 69,000-seat stadium so silent one can hear players yelling and cheering on teammates from the field and sideline up in the press box three levels and a hundred or so yards away.
Carroll began his postgame press conference Sunday night bemoaning, again, the fact fans could not be in the stadium to shake it to its bolts during yet another wild ending to a Seahawks game.
“I have regret. I have a major regret that the 12s weren’t here to see that one, as well as all these other games that have been here in this season,” the coach said. “It’s so regrettable that you haven’t been able to enjoy it.
“Because you guys would have never gone home tonight.
“So, just speaking to our fans, I hope you had a ball with it, at home, or where you’re doing it. And I hope you guys believe like our guys believe.”
The Pittsburgh Steelers became the latest team to have some fans in attendance at a home game for the first time this past weekend. The Steelers had about 4,000 people inside 68,400-seat Heinz Field for their win over Philadelphia, per an order by Pennsylvania’s governor that now allows reduced-capacity crowds at Steelers and Eagles games.
The NFL has 16 teams, exactly half the league, that are having or planning to have some fans at games by Nov. 1: Miami, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Tennessee, Denver, Kansas City, Dallas, Green Bay, Atlanta, Carolina and Tampa Bay.
No team west of the Rocky Mountains has been given approval from state and local governments per public-health restrictions to have fans at NFL games.
King County and Washington remain one of the most locked-down counties and states in the country, and have been since the pandemic began six months ago.
That continued lockdown has come at a huge economic cost to workers and industries in our state and along the West Coast.
Less important, it has come at a huge cost to Seahawks fans who want to see their team play again. The team has said only that there will not be fans for at least the first three home games. The third is Nov. 1 against San Francisco.
No signs in Washington from government or public-health polices suggests fans in CenturyLink Field anytime soon.
Carroll was asked on his weekly radio show with Seattle’s KIRO AM Monday morning if there’s any chance fans can come to Seahawks home games this season.
The coach replied he knows of “some (undefined) conversations that, hopefully, there can be some people there at the end” of the season.
Seattle’s last regular-season home game is scheduled for Dec. 27 against the Los Angeles Rams, in week 16.
This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 7:45 AM.
