Pete Carroll’s greatest takeaway of Seahawks’ season: being NFL’s only COVID-free team
The Seahawks just pulled off a remarkable feat.
It goes against all statistical probabilities.
It’s not winning the NFC West for the first time in four years. It’s not Russell Wilson’s team-record 40 touchdown passes.
It’s ultimately more important than winning football games.
Yet, as Pete Carroll said: “No one wants to hear it.”
Not now. Not yet. Not after the Seahawks squandered their division title, 12-win season and more favorable seeding in the NFC playoffs with a dismal, first-round home loss to the Los Angeles Rams just a few days ago.
Thing is, it means everything to the 69-year-old coach. He took this NFL season like no other as a personal challenge, in ways well beyond football.
Carroll said his greatest take-away from the Seahawks’ 2020 season is they kept their players and their families free from contracting the COVID-19 virus that’s infected 22.7 million Americans.
The Seahawks were the NFL’s only team to not have a positive case for the COVID-19 virus this season, one played treacherously through the coronavirus pandemic, game cancellations and other team facilities still being closed to contain the virus into the playoffs.
Seattle’s reserve defensive end Jonathan Bullard missed the playoff game while on the league’s reserve/COVID-19 list. But that was from the team’s second false-positive test result since August (after wide receiver John Ursua). The Seahawks had three other players go on the COVID-19 list last month. All were for contact-tracing issues; starting right tackle Brandon Shell, defensive tackle Bryan Mone and safety Damarious Randall were close to someone outside the team who tested positive.
“There’s a lot that we dealt with, and these guys we’re going to continue to deal with staying healthy,” Carroll said.
“We’ve been after it all year long.”
The average number of players on the COVID-19 list per NFL team this season was 15. That’s according to a tally by Ben Volin of the Boston Globe.
The Baltimore Ravens had 47. Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, the reigning league most valuable player, missed a key division game at Pittsburgh because of testing positive.
Washington had the fewest players go on the reserve/COVID-19 list, two. But at least one of Washington’s players was a confirmed positive test Seattle did not have.
Their plan
Back in March, when the pandemic first closed down the country, including all NFL offseason work with players, Carroll and team director of player health and performance Sam Ramsden began planning how to beat the coronavirus. They saw it as an competitive edge. They knew they couldn’t win games if Wilson, Bobby Wagner and DK Metcalf were missing games after testing positive for COVID-19 or hanging around people who were.
Ramsden became the team’s infection control officer; the NFL required each team have one. He instituted the team’s daily COVID-19 testing plan, carried out each morning in a trailer set up in the players’ parking lot. He established new safety protocols inside the team facility in Renton.
Carroll and Ramsden created competitions between position groups. They rewarded those who stayed socially distant best in the locker room and throughout the team facility. The Seahawks were able to measure that by the contract-tracing monitors each player, coach and person wore each day while inside the building. The monitor beeped when one came within six feet of another. The team got a daily readout of who beeped when and with whom.
The coach constantly stressed to players they must avoid restaurants, or order only to-go or delivery meals, if they must. The team’s dining staff prepared grab-and-go meals that players ordered from their phones that they could take home each day.
Significantly, Carroll insisted every player inform the team of each visitor he was about to see — family members, significant others, buddies from here and back home. The team arranged for each of those visitors to get a COVID-19 test at team headquarters, using the same testing staff and procedures the players did. Those visitors’ tests had the same rapid processing time as the Seahawks’ tests. They got their results within 18 hours or so, before they could then see their Seahawk.
It worked, wondrously. The Seahawks won their first NFC West title since 2016.
This week Carroll acknowledged some players were mentally tired from playing 17 games, traveling, practicing, meeting and adhering all while they fought against the coronavirus.
“That’s absolutely the facts, that it’s going to wear on them. But we can’t go there,” Carroll said. “We ain’t done. We didn’t finish anything. We are right in the middle of it.”
He knows the rest of the country, with those 22.7 million COVID-19 cases and 376,000 deaths still spiking because of the virus as of Tuesday, has had it far worse than the Seahawks did.
“I really don’t have much patience for giving into this thing — ’It’s too hard.’ Because it isn’t over,” Carroll said.
“It is hard. It is challenging. Heck, yeah, it is for everybody. But we also found that by facing it up and going for it and not backing off the challenge and not succumbing to the nature that, ‘Oh, gosh, it’s so tough!’ and weakening, we stayed strong.”
The Seahawks showed their appreciation for those who kept them strong: the relentlessly upbeat and fun nurses and staff who showed up for work every morning before sunrise from late July through Monday to conduct the team’s COVID-19 tests.
They swabbed noses and processed tests for 53 players on the active roster, 16 more on the practice squad, a dozen more on injured reserve, plus about a hundred coaches and staff members, about 200 days in a row. That included weekends, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day spent inside the testing trailer at the team facility. The nurses and testing staff were on the team plane for road games and testing at Seahawks hotels.
The team’s COVID testers raised the 12 Flag just before kickoff on Saturday. A couple of them were jumping up and down with excitement over being there.
Off on their own
About a half hour after their season-ending playoff loss to the Rams on Saturday, Tyler Lockett wasn’t thinking about the stunning defeat or his franchise-record 100 receptions in 2020.
He was concerned he was leaving the “self-bubble” the Seahawks successfully maintained for him and his teammates for six months, from the training camp reporting day through Sunday’s and Monday’s locker clean-outs and exit interviews with coaches.
“That hard part is, not only do you lose in a playoff game, we’ve got to go back to our homes and will be thinking about all the stuff we’ve been through this whole year, with just having to get tested every day,” Lockett said. “Having to try to stay away from as many people as we possibly can. Being careful with who you fly up here to be around.
“You got a lot of guys that sacrificed a lot. You got people who couldn’t be around family.
“This was just a whole different year in general, man.”
Last summer, five months into the pandemic, the 28-year-old Lockett was 50-50 on whether to play this season. He considered opting out of 2020 because of COVID-19. He feared the risk of catching the virus and passing it to older, vulnerable family members.
He played and stayed virus-free. Up to now, anyway.
“And now we, literally, have to go back to being at home, back into the real world,” he said. “It’s hard being in a real world while we’ve been away from it for so long. And now we got to figure out, like where are we going to go? Who we’re going to see? Who we are not going to see?”
The players don’t know if the introduction of vaccines across the country will allow them by May to have offseason minicamps and workouts at team headquarters. They had none of those in 2020.
Lockett’s thinking it’s possible if not likely he and his teammates will be on their own across the country until the start of training camp this summer.
“I mean, that’s a lot, being at home all the way to the end of July, especially during COVID everything is shut down,” he said. “So, I mean, it’s one of those things where you just got to kind of rewire your mind and figure out how to adjust again.”
Carroll is aware the players are losing their safety net. Now they are going to be like the rest of us, fighting the pandemic without daily, rapid-result tests getting flown by chartered jet to California for processing each afternoon.
“That’s a major concern right now, is that everybody goes home and those that leave the area they take the lessons that they’ve learned and the discipline that they’ve acquired and share it with their families and the people that they’re going to be around,” Carroll said. “Be really, really careful how things move forward.
“The message to them (is) we’ve got take what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown in your awareness in your conscience and maintain it.”
Carroll said he’s worried that as his players leave they won’t have the support system around them to reinforce what the Seahawks mastered to create the league’s only virus-free team.
“We figured out how to deal with it here,” Carroll said. “It’s just plain diligence. Every frickin’ day. Everything you’re doing. And it doesn’t change when you go home. It doesn’t change for our people in our community. That’s the only way you can get this done.
“We can kick ass on this thing, but you need support. You need help. You need people to rally with you. You need theme. You need approach, all that stuff, to get it done.
“So, yeah, I know that they’re worn. But they can’t hear that right now. Ain’t no time to let up.”
This story was originally published January 12, 2021 at 12:11 PM.
