NFL tells teams: no playoff bubbles. It’s exactly what Pete Carroll, Seahawks wanted
If the Seahawks make the playoffs again, they can keep fighting COVID-19 their way.
Because it works.
The NFL and its players’ union decided Tuesday to scrap the idea of local “playoff bubbles,” teams qualifying for the postseason having to sequester in separate hotels every day between playoff games.
The league had been discussing its playoff teams possibly tightening the bubble around each of them. It would have been a version of the postseason bubbles the NBA and NHL used with specific, neutral game sites to successful complete their playoffs during the cornonavirus pandemic this past summer.
The NFL months ago determined a single site for all postseason games—as the NBA had in Orlando, Florida—or two playoff bubble cities, as the NHL had in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta, was not feasible. Pro football has more than twice the number of players on each team’s roster, not to mention the dozens of coaches and more staff and medical-support personnel for a much larger traveling party to effectively contain and maintain inside one site for an extended period.
The NFL informed teams Tuesday night they “cannot require players and staff members to stay at a hotel during the playoffs other than the night prior to a game,” in a memorandum obtained by NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero.
Pelissero reported “the choice to forego local bubbles was recommended by the league and NFL Players Association medical experts based on COVID-19 testing data. The NFL and NFLPA are pleased with numbers related to the coronavirus and therefore sticking ‘with what works’ for the postseason, Pelissero relayed from the league memo to teams Tuesday.
That’s exactly what Pete Carroll and the Seahawks wanted.
In the ultimate knock-on-wood fact, the Seahawks remain the league’s only team to not have a positive COVID-19 case since daily testing began for every team on July 28. They put reserve defensive tackle Bryan Mone, who is on injured reserve, as their first player on the reserve/COVID-19 list briefly into last week. But Carroll said that was for a contract-tracing issue of Mone being close to a person outside the team who tested positive.
It’s remarkable streak. It validates the measures Carroll have had his Seahawks taking beyond the NFL’s protocols. Seattle has been more effective than any other team in keeping the coronavirus away, despite COVID-19 spiking again across the country and league.
“Absolutely. No, I wouldn’t want to change anything,” Carroll said, foreshadowing the playoff COVID-19 protocol he got from the league Tuesday night.
“We have this thing under control, as much as you could. Our guys know how to do it. Our people know how to maintain it and orchestrate it.
“Why would we—there’s no way in the world we’d want to change.”
A near-certainty
Seattle (9-4) has a 99% chance to make the playoffs, according to The New York Times’ NFL postseason probability analysis.
The Seahawks currently hold the fifth of seven playoff spots in the NFC, the first wild-card. They are on track to host an NFC West division title game next week, Dec. 27, against the 9-4 Los Angeles Rams. Seattle first plays at East-leading Washington (6-7) while Los Angeles, which beat the Seahawks in California last month. hosts the New York Jets (0-13).
The Seahawks just beat the Jets 40-3 last weekend.
Carroll had said the NFL was deep in discussions with general managers including Seattle’s John Schneider about how to separate teams during the playoffs.
“I know that they’ve had some meetings. I know John has some meetings coming up, too, particularly about what’s going on in the postseason,” Carroll said Monday.
No matter how far they go in their eighth postseason in nine years under Carroll, this season may already be the best leadership work of his long coaching career.
“This is the most I’ve ever had to coach,” Carroll said.
How they do it
The Seahawks’ in-person team meetings, fewer now almost by the week, take up half the 100-yard indoor practice field. The players are 10 feet apart in those meetings, instead of six feet almost universally mandated by public-health authorities.
“We virtually meet on Monday. Guys are at home for Zoom meetings in the recap and telecommute Monday and all that,” Carroll said.
To cut down on how long players spend in the locker room in relatively close quarters, Carroll has condensed the time between the Seahawks’ morning walk-through and their main, afternoon practices.
The 69-year-old coach has said he and his wife Glena are taking it as personal challenges to not contract the coronavirus. He’s extended that challenge to his team. He’s made not getting COVID-19 a part of his daily competition ethos. He has competitions among position groups over who has proven to be the most COVID-19 aware and safe, who is winning at keeping socially distant.
Yes, the Seahawks can measure that. It’s through the contract tracers the players and everyone inside the team facility must wear each day. The tracers emit a loud, incessant beeping anytime someone comes within six feet of someone else. That beeping has become more of a football sound than that of coaches’ whistles this unprecedented NFL season amid the pandemic.
All-Pro linebacker Bobby Wagner said this summer: “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of self-discipline.”
Carroll said: “The thing that’s going on here is it’s recognizing the constant challenge and making efforts to stay abreast with that challenge calls for.”
The Seahawks are beating that challenge with money.
They are spending upwards of $40 million for daily COVID-19 testing. It’s done by tireless, energetic and fun-loving technicians from the NFL-contracted BioReference Laboratories, who report to work before dawn each day to trailers parked just outside the Seahawks’ team facility.
Players, coaches and staff report there by 9 a.m. seven days per week (and at the team hotel on game days) to get cotton swabs swirled around the inside fronts of each nasal cavity. Those swabs are sealed in vials and transported to the airport. Each afternoon a pilot flies a chartered plane with those Seahawks’ tests onboard to Burbank, California, to have the results processed and reported back to the team within 12-18 hours. That’s so each person tested can be cleared to go back into the Seahawks’ facility the next day.
Each morning, including weekends and holidays, the testing process repeats itself. So does the process of flying the tests to Burbank each afternoon and returning a plane to Seattle in time for the next day’s run. A couple technicians even fly on the team plane with the Seahawks to road games, to continue the testing each morning at their road hotels.
Not every team has had their technicians fly on the charter with it. Some had have had their lab techs fly commercially to meet the team at a road city. But the Seahawks see that as an unnecessary risk of exposure to the virus for the technicians. So they give the techs seats on their plane. The testers are essentially are inside Seattle’s roving team “bubble,” too.
Though he says the financial hardships of small businesses in the Seattle area pain him, Carroll has told his players not to eat at restaurants. He’s had the team’s food-services staff prepared whole, multiple meals for each player so they don’t have to go out to eat—and if they do, make it take out. That is, if you don’t already have a personal chef, as many do.
A definitely different Christmas
The Seahawks also are paying for any visitors to players to first report to team headquarters for COVID-19 testing, so they can be cleared before entering the players’ at-home bubbles. Carroll’s protocols, above and beyond the NFL’s, rely on his players telling Seahawks staff of anyone and anyone who is coming to visit them.
That is making for an especially busy, and unusual, holiday season.
The coach has told his players this holiday season must be unlike any they’ve ever had—and hopefully, for all of us, will ever have again.
“The message really is that we don’t get all of the stuff that we would like,” Carroll said. “We don’t get all of the freedoms and the comforts and the loving opportunities with our family—this time around.
“We’ll get through it. We just have to postpone some of the joy that we normally get. We’ve got to do it another ways. We’ve got to do it virtually. We’ve got to get on the phone and we got to do what we can. So we have to stay separate to just give us a chance at the end.”
“I can see why people on the outside run into problems (contracting COVID-19), because you need structure and you need guidelines and you need goals and, you know, motivation and attitude and so forth. All of those elements,” Carroll said. “Without those, people are left up to their own. They’ve got to figure it out. (They’ve) easily wandered into the problem areas.
“And we don’t live like that.”
Carroll acknowledges the limitless financial resources for NFL teams and players are a large reason for the Seahawks’ testing success.
To put it another way: imagine your local school district having $40 million to spend on daily COVID-19 testing. Yes, our kids and their teachers would be back in class.
Carroll knows his team has advantages in fighting and winning against COVID-19. But he also acknowledges the Seahawks are succeeding in self-discipline.
“We know how to prevent this from happening. I mean, as best as you can,” Carroll said. “Our guys are still living apart and all living on their own.
“It’s all back to the discipline that it takes to uphold the regimen.
“I wish. I wish everybody could benefit from that we have. We’re highly motivated and we’ve got all the facilities. We’ve got everything going for it, you know, so I have everything to back it up. But at least there is a way, an illustration, of how you can do it.
“We’ll try to hold on to this.”
Including, now, their way into the playoffs.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 7:49 PM.
