The Seahawks are perfect against COVID, but the Huskies got crushed — what happened?

Washington should have played in the Pac-12 championship on Friday.

But after making it through fall camp and five weeks of the season without having to pause football activities due to COVID-19 within the program, the Huskies have now had to bow out of two straight games — a match-up with Oregon that would have decided the North Division champion on the field and the title game.

Friday, UW Athletics announced the Huskies have “elected to not pursue a bowl bid due to medical reasons.”

It’s a sharp contrast to the Seahawks who, in the ultimate knock-on-wood fact, remain the league’s only team to not have a positive COVID-19 case since daily testing began for every team on July 28.

Seattle’s NFL team across Lake Washington from UW put reserve defensive tackle Bryan Mone, who is on injured reserve, as the Seahawks’ first player on the reserve/COVID-19 list. He was on it briefly into last week. But coach Pete Carroll said that was for a contact-tracing issue: Mone was close to a person outside the team who tested positive.

In a sense, the streak, though not measured by wins and losses, is as remarkable as an undefeated season. It validates the measures Carroll has had his Seahawks take 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.

It also highlights what the Huskies and college football are not doing successfully.

What’s the difference? Start with money, the vast resources of an NFL team, and players highly motivated to preserve multi-million-dollar contracts. Compare that to a college program. Resources are available, but not on the NFL scale, and they can’t keep up with every movement and decision made by unpaid student-athletes, their friends and families.

Wait, the Seahawks and Huskies are both football programs, right? Don’t they run the same way?

No.

The NCAA places scholarship (85) and roster (105) limits on each major-college program. The Seahawks have an active-roster limit of 53 players, per NFL rules, plus a 16-man practice squad. So UW has dozens more players. That’s dozens upon dozens, into the hundreds, more daily chances to contract and spread the coronavirus among Huskies than among Seahawks.

But more than that: Follow the money. The Seahawks share of the NFL’s annual television contracts is about $260 million. The Seahawks get another $160 million or so in in-stadium revenues—at least they did before the pandemic kept fans from being allowed to attend games this season.

That firepower of almost a half-billion dollars per year in league revenue — not to mention being owned by the trust of the late Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and one of the world’s wealthiest persons — gives the Seahawks essentially limitless resources. As we will detail in a minute, the Seahawks are throwing those resources at testing and safeguards that UW or any college program, even mighty, rich Alabama, just doesn’t have.

Plus, the pandemic has crushed college athletic departments across the country. Even with budget and salary cuts, staff furloughs and an aggressive fundraising campaign, UW athletic director Jen Cohen said she’s anticipating a $30 million loss for the department. When UW made those 15% cuts to the overall athletic department operating budget in June, Cohen estimated it would save the school around $13 million. So while the Seahawks have a half-billion to combat the budget, the estimated budget for the Huskies’ entire athletic department for FY21 is around $86 million.

After the Pac-12 announced daily antigen testing, The San Jose Mercury News’ John Wilner reported that the cost for antigen testing is $21 to $23 per test, which is cheaper than a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test ($30). Wilner wrote that for a football program to order 150 antigen tests to administer daily over 15 weeks, the cost would be about $350,000. That’s on top of the PCR tests, which UW gives at least once a week.

Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said the prices of the tests were confidential but would be covered by member schools.

How does COVID-19 testing for the Seahawks and Huskies differ?

Short answer: the Seahawks can afford more expensive and efficient testing than the Huskies. Long answer: It’s complicated.

The Seahawks are getting tested each morning in trailers outside their team headquarters along Lake Washington in Renton.

Each day, the Seahawks run what scientists see as the “gold standard” of coronavirus testing, the most accurate measure of current COVID-19 infection and spread: PCR testing. It is a quick cotton swab swirl inside each nose nostril — not the all-the-way-up-the-nasal-cavity-to-the-throat test of the early days of the pandemic.

PCR tests detect and measure the genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in every test subject. They are considered better than the daily antigen testing the Pac-12 uses because PCR tests detect active infections.

The Huskies use the antigen test, which detects a protein from the coronavirus. Antigen tests are slower, and known to be less accurate than PCR tests.

“You don’t need complex and expensive test kits to detect the antigens,” Nam Tran, professor of laboratory medicine and UC Davis Health, told the university’s health center’s website in November. “That makes them cheaper and faster. The problem is, there is a little lag time between when someone gets infected and when the antigens show up.”

UC Davis Health reports if a person is not near peak infection – but is still contagious – the antigen tests may come back negative. Depending on the quality of the antigen test and the test takers, false negatives could be as high as 20%.

To stop the spread of COVID-19 before it starts on a team, that team needs current infection situations, not whether a player had the virus weeks or months ago. And they need as close to 100% accuracy as possible.

That’s what the NFL’s PCR tests provide, giving the league’s teams PCR results at game-changing speed.

The beauty of the Seahawks getting the gold-standard tests is they are paying to get the PCR results of them within 12-18 hours. That’s vital to immediately controlling any possible spread of positive cases. Each player, coach and staff member is not allowed to enter the team’s facility until after he and she gets e-mail confirmation of a negative test from the previous day.

The testing is 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 the same 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.

At UW, PCR tests are administered at least once a week, and antigen tests are given daily before practice.

Husky players arrive in groups each day for testing. The staff walks the players through the process, but the tests are self-administered. The tests are then transferred to the processing facility on campus. A single antigen test takes about 15 minutes to process, and they process steadily once they begin running.

Robert Scheidegger, UW’s associate athletic director for health and wellness and the football team’s head athletic trainer, compared the antigen testing process to a more sophisticated temperature check station. It’s used to prevent a person infected with COVID-19 from entering the UW footprint. The antigen tests are processed with machines on campus.

“The one little drawback to the PCR test is that it takes some time to process, Scheidegger said in October. “It’s just not functional to get this test and expect to have a turnaround that’s quick enough that you can essentially use it as a screening tool for athletes before they participate.

“A lot of the ways that people are using PCR testing is they test every day, but they are always a day behind with their results. One thing that our medical people in our conference really wanted to do was find a way that we could get a little bit ahead in that process and find a better way to screen athletes so that they can participate.”

Antigen testing tends to give more false positives than PCR testing. If a player has a positive antigen test, UW then conducts an PCR tests.

The Seahawks are spending upwards of $40 million for their daily COVID-19 testing that started with reporting day for training camp July 28 and runs as long as their season.

For the Huskies, antigen tests reportedly cost $21 to $23 per test, while a PCR test is about $30. For a college football program to order 150 antigen tests to administer daily over 15 weeks, the cost would be about $350,000.

Again, UW also gives PCR tests at least once a week.

What are the standards for canceling games?

Short answer: At the college level, cancellation standards are tougher, but testing protocols are weaker. At the NFL level, testing protocols are stronger, and cancellation is a last resort.

Unlike the Pac-12, the NFL really doesn’t have a clear threshold of positive cases that would cancel a game. The league has reacted to each outbreak of COVID-19 differently, and at times punitively.

Last month the Denver Broncos lost all four of their quarterbacks for the same game after one tested positive, and three others were found by team-facility surveillance video the league monitors to have not worn masks when all four quarterbacks met on an off-day for film study at Broncos’ headquarters. That put the other three quarterbacks on the reserve/COVID-19 list for contact-tracing reasons. In what was widely seen as punishment for their players not following masking and distancing rules, the league forced Denver to play that week’s game with a practice-squad wide receiver at QB. He threw more interceptions than completed passes, and the Broncos lost to the Saints 31-3.

But when the Ravens had more than 20 positive cases a few weeks ago, the league bent over backwards to keep their game at Pittsburgh on. It got rescheduled three times and finally got played on a Wednesday night, a rare game day in the NFL.

The league REALLY does not want to postpone games and add an 18th week to the regular season in the second week of January. That would push back the start of the playoffs and potentially the date of the Super Bowl in early February. A lot of money hinges on sticking to the original schedule.

In contrast, the Pac-12 allows teams to request a cancellation if they don’t have at least 53 scholarship players available to participate and/or the following minimum number of position scholarship players available: seven offensive linemen, one quarterback and four defensive linemen.

Each institution provided complete rosters by position to the conference office prior to the season. Schools can play with roster sizes below the threshold if they choose. If not, the game is rescheduled or declared a no contest after approval by the commissioner.

Additionally, games are rescheduled or declared a no contest in the event of the following:

▪ Inability to isolate new positive cases within a team or athletic department or to quarantine high-risk contacts.

▪ Unavailability or inability to perform testing as provided by the Pac-12 medical guidelines.

▪ Campus-wide or local community transmission rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials.

▪ Inability to perform adequate contact tracing consistent with governmental requirements.

▪ Local public health officials of the home team state that there is an inability for the hospital infrastructure to accommodate a surge.

What are the restrictions on players on each team?

The NFL requires all players to wear masks basically at all times they aren’t wearing their helmets. That includes on the sidelines during games, on the practice field at the beginning of practices and during lighter, walk-through drills without helmets.

If the Seahawks sign a new player, or if any Seahawk misses a single day of COVID-19 testing, he must complete (or re-enter) a six-day entry protocol of tests before he can enter (or re-enter) the team facility.

Standards differ at UW. When players aren’t actively practicing, Scheidegger asks athletes to only participate in activities that experts consider low risk. He advises them to always wear a face covering and remain 6 feet apart. When players enter the facility for testing, they remain spaced and with face coverings on until the antigen results return.

Husky players don’t have to wear a face mask while practicing on the field, but they are required to pull their masks on when they are standing on the sideline. The athletic department also conducts contact tracing.

The Huskies won’t be able to return to the practice field until they have two consecutive days of no positive tests.

Whose fault is it that UW couldn’t play in Friday’s Pac-12 title game?

Missing the game doesn’t appear to be the players’ fault, nor is it a sneaky way to claim the conference title without playing. When UW was determining whether or not it could play Oregon, conspiracy theories began circulating among fans on Twitter that the Huskies were ducking the game on purpose in order to win the Pac-12 North by default. Christin Molden, the mother of star defensive back Elijah Molden, took it upon herself to respond.

“Let me clear something up,” she wrote in a tweet. “We haven’t seen our son in almost 6 mos to protect the football “”bubble”. Players sacrifice DAILY, to keep games going. NOBODY is lacking in incentive to play. We want the game to happen as badly as Duck fans do. It’s a pandemic, not a conspiracy.”

Put another way:

“This thing is highly contagious,” Scheidegger said during a Zoom call last week. “Even when you do everything the right way, it’s really hard to get a handle on. We don’t know a ton of stuff about this.”

It’s actually contact tracing — not the actual amount of positive tests — that kept UW out of the game against Oregon and the Pac-12 championship.

The Huskies had zero offensive linemen available due to a combination of positive tests and contact tracing. UW had isolated cases ahead of games against Utah and Stanford, but was still able to play both due to contact tracing and isolation. Currently, the entire team is in isolation.

As of Thursday, 137 college football games have been canceled or postponed nationally due to COVID-19.

UW made it through training camp and four games before pausing football activities for the first time. The athletic department sends out weekly COVID-19 testing updates for all student-athletes. In the latest report released Wednesday, UW had 560 student-athletes who have gone through testing and 25 active positive cases, up from 11 last week.

Since student-athletes began returning to campus on June 15, UW has administered 6,360 PCR tests and have had 79 total positive cases. That’s a positive rate of 1.24%. The positive rate in King County over the past 14 days is 9.3%.

How do the COVID-19 restrictions for college and NFL players compare?

The Seahawks basically go from their homes (or in younger or newer players’ cases, their team hotel) to the team’s facility in Renton and back each day.

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 the 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 limit 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.

Unlike the Seahawks, the Huskies go back to their dorms or shared houses and apartments, in close quarters with fellow students who’ve done who knows what with whom that day, week and month. College students don’t wear contact tracers.

Seahawks players do. The players and everyone inside the team facility wear them every day. The tracers beep loudly whenever someone comes within six feet of someone else. The devices also record every other transmitter a player comes within six feet of each day inside the team facility, and for how long.

Moreover, Carroll and his wife Glena are taking it as personal challenges to not contract the coronavirus. He’s extended that challenge to his team. It’s become 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.

Husky players lack such Cadillac-level gear, but Scheidegger said UW put up new plexiglass barriers in workout spaces, and the Huskies moved equipment to open-air areas around the stadium. They also limited the capacity of meeting spaces and all the rooms in the facility.

When not actively practicing, face coverings are mandatory. Scheidegger said decisions made outside the facilities would have the most impact, so he continually stressed the importance of face masks, social distancing and low-risk activities. If a player showed symptoms or had a positive antigen test, they were immediately isolated.

“Then (it’s) contact tracing and isolating individuals that they may have come in contact with who could potentially be asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 and taking appropriate steps in that regard,” Scheidegger said.

What are the Seahawks doing right compared to other NFL teams?

Mainly, the Seahawks are staying home.

And when someone—anyone—visits them, their team is having those guests get COVID-19 tests before they arrive.

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 prepare 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.

More remarkably, 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 who is coming to visit.

That is making for an especially busy, and unusual, holiday season.

The coach has told his players this Christmas and New Year’s 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 in other 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.”

Is Pete Carroll doing something that Jimmy Lake isn’t doing?

A junior, sophomore and freshman scholarship player at Washington has a reasonable assurance he’s going to have a scholarship next year, whether he misses games this year or not.

Carroll has the power of the Seahawks’ and NFL’s non-guaranteed player contracts and guys needing jobs they aren’t sure they’ll have next year. That commands strict compliance and loyalty in every aspect of the coach’s program, if he wants to play and thus keep a job. The oldest axiom in pro football is “the ability is availability.” If a guy doesn’t or can’t play, Carroll will find someone who will and can.

And, again, we can’t overstate how Carroll’s NFL resources are the main, mammoth reason for the Seahawks’ testing success.

Think of it this way: Jimmy Lake isn’t likely or able to have a backup safety’s girlfriend tested for COVID-19 before she visits that player.

Carroll is.

Carroll acknowledges all of this. He knows his team has advantages in fighting and winning against COVID-19. He knows he has advantages in the luxurious NFL that he wouldn’t have if he were still the coach at USC, as he was for the decade before he took over the Seahawks in 2010. If was still at USC, he’d be in the situation Lake faces at UW, inside the same conference.

But Carroll also acknowledges the Seahawks are succeeding in what All-Pro, $54 million linebacker Bobby Wagner saw back in the summer was the key to any team succeeding in this unprecedented, COVID-19 season.

“At the end of the day, it’s going to be a lot of self-discipline,” Wagner said.

“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.”

Are other Pac-12 schools (i.e., Oregon) doing a better job? If so, how?

The Pac-12 has uniform requirements across the conference, which include daily point-of-care testing on each day of full practice, higher-risk of transmission activity, travel, and games and minimum once weekly PCR test in addition to daily point-of-care testing.

Seven teams in the Pac-12 had to cancel at least one game this season after not being able meet the minimum roster or position threshold — Washington (2), California (3), Utah (2), Arizona State (3), Washington State (2), USC (1) and Arizona (1).

It’s worth noting that those states — Washington, California, Utah and Arizona — have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic. Los Angeles County (USC), Maricopa County (Arizona State), Salt Lake County (Utah), King County (UW) are among the top 50 counties for confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country. Other than Washington State, all of the schools that experienced outbreaks are located in populous, urban areas.

“This virus is just spreading across the whole country,” Lake said during a Zoom call last week. “It’s spreading across the whole country and it seems like it doesn’t pick where it’s going to go and where it doesn’t go. It goes everywhere.

If the Seahawks get an A+ grade for COVID-19 practices, what grade does UW deserve?

No matter how far they go into the playoffs this season, this is already be the best leadership work of Carroll’s coaching career.

His began when Richard Nixon was president.

“This is the most I’ve ever had to coach,” Carroll said.

He means more than football.

“The thing that’s going on here is it’s recognizing the constant challenge and making efforts to stay abreast with what that challenge calls for,” he said.

He’s gone above and beyond the NFL’s protocols. He’s gotten his players to buy into the importance, made it daily points of pride and competition within the Seahawks.

Heck, he’s got 25-year-olds telling the coach and team when girlfriends are coming by, so they can get COVID-19 testing before their dates.

That alone is an A-plus-plus accomplishment.

Grading UW is more difficult. These aren’t professional athletes with bottomless resources to test everyone they come in contact with outside the facilities. These are college students who spent months away from their families — unable to see them for Thanksgiving and now Christmas — as they attempted to keep COVID-19 out of the football footprint.

Saying this wouldn’t have happened if the Huskies had just done everything right is assigning morality to a virus. It’s also an unfair standard to apply to unpaid college athletes.

Or, as Lake said last week: “Our guys did a fantastic job and they continue to do a good job of doing all the stuff our medical team has advised them to do. Unfortunately, this virus is just wicked. It’s extremely infectious. We are seeing that right now. We had been seeing that for months now with other teams that have felt the veracity of this thing.”

Let’s give the Huskies an incomplete.

This story was originally published December 19, 2020 at 6:15 AM.