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Charles Robinson of YahooSports.com says the NFL won’t run afoul of as many problems as MLB.
Major League Baseball was the canary in the coal mine.
If something was capable of going sideways for a league operating without a bubble during the COVID-19 pandemic, baseball would send a warning to the NFL. Football executives didn’t expect it to come so soon in the season — after a single weekend baseball series — nor did they anticipate the warning to be a full-blown air raid siren. But here we are, with the Miami Marlins already teetering on the brink with 15 players and two coaches testing positive for COVID-19.
The seemingly unforgivable sin? Playing a game almost immediately after the team allegedly knew that at least three players had tested positive for COVID-19.
That was the eyebrow-raiser for NFL teams. Rolling the dice with the likelihood of playing multiple infected players might be one of the first things that will end up separating the NFL from Major League Baseball. If there’s anything the NFL is taking away from MLB’s first huge mistake, it’s that an outbreak preceding a game isn’t going to be taken lightly. Especially if it means an NFL team would take the chance of sending out a team on Sunday that might have multiple infected players taking the field.
“Definitely a ‘no’,” said one NFL general manager, when asked if he’d risk playing with a swath of potentially infected players.
“No way,” said another. “Never.”
In NFL, no one wants to be culprit that ruined 2020 season
Here’s the thing about the NFL, and I think we’re about to learn this in the coming days: No franchise wants to risk the league’s entire season because it made a mistake. Nobody wants to be the reckless embarrassment. Nobody wants to be the gambling pariah. And more than anything, nobody wants to be the weak link that ultimately undercuts the vast amount of work that has gone into getting the 2020 season on track.
For that simple reason, we wasted some energy on Monday measuring what the Marlins’ outbreak means for the NFL. Why? If a huge swath of NFL players on one team suddenly came up positive on a Saturday, it’s very likely that Sunday will produce a forfeit rather than a situation where a team hopes for the best and ultimately ends up endangering another franchise, and by extension, the league and 2020 season.
That’s what I believe. I don’t think an NFL team could get hit hard by multiple positive tests on a Saturday — knowing it had just taken a flight where the entire team was exposed to the coronavirus — and then take the field on a Sunday. It’s too risky to the rest of the league. And the NFL fraternity is too vicious when it comes to the grudge department to take that kind of chance.
This is why the baseball failures can be instructive, but also an example of why the NFL is the NFL and baseball is baseball. It’s the same reason why MLB went through an ugly and drawn-out labor dispute to even get this shortened season going — right up to the precipice of a cancellation — and the NFL somehow got itself on track with nothing more than a few minor bruises. Everyone involved was acutely aware of what was at stake. And neither side wanted to be the one that blew it up.
Now that responsibility is getting split into 32 fragments, with teams individually carrying the burden of not screwing it all up — whether through negligence or pride. It matters. From the best franchises in the league to the worst. Maybe even more to the worst because nobody wants to be branded with the lasting mistake of throwing an entire season and league into chaos.
What if an NFL team followed Marlins’ example?
That’s not to say the NFL is perfect and incapable of failure. Or that some franchise won’t crash and undercut this endeavor. Certainly, football could crater and end up as a longstanding example of what not to do in a pandemic. But that’s not going to happen because a team didn’t know what’s at stake. Everyone knows what is on the line here. And everyone knows how hard this is going to be. If you’re not convinced of that, then the $75 million allocated for rigorous COVID-19 testing (and maybe even more money when it’s all over) hasn’t sunk in.
From commissioner Roger Goodell to the bottom rung of the lowliest franchise, there is little question about what is on the line for football. Should the NFL pull this 2020 season off to completion, it will represent one of the single greatest joint accomplishments in the history of sports in North America. And it will will have been accomplished despite an almost unthinkable number of variables, moving parts and unforeseen pitfalls — thanks not only to the league office and team owners, but also the players and their families, the union and an army of support personnel.
Given the high volume of players, the physicality of the sport and the fact that the NFL is reaching for a full season, this is a more monumental undertaking than the combined efforts of baseball, basketball and hockey. Particularly when it’s occurring without the safety net of a bubble or a hotline for snitches.
Make no mistake, the high level of difficulty in this endeavor creates an appreciation for this on teams. That’s what makes the whole Marlins fiasco so stunning to some of the people who run NFL teams. They can’t imagine compounding one bad situation with another, which is exactly what the Marlins did when they had a handful of positive tests and then took a baseball field almost immediately after. All the while, the team was not only exposing itself to more positive virus results, but also the Philadelphia Phillies. It turned out to be a horrific gamble given the results of a wider outbreak in the immediate aftermath.
I don’t know baseball well enough to comment on the league’s institutional memory, but I can say this: an opposing NFL team and the league in general would never forget a franchise taking that kind of chance. If the NFL is anything, it’s both savage and vindictive. And for any team to run into a swath of positive tests and then trot out multiple players who might be infected with COVID-19 — the repercussions would be lasting. Especially if it led to another franchise being knocked off its axis and the NFL suddenly being plunged into turmoil.
If a team is in a position of authority and it endangers this entire NFL season out of stupidity or negligence, it’s going to be marked. There are going to be repercussions. That club would pay eventually, one way or another. Other franchise owners will remember. Other general managers and coaches will, too. You can’t simply take the avenue of Marlins manager Don Mattingly, who justified Miami taking the field under a COVID cloud by saying, “We’re taking risks every day. That’s what players all around the league are doing.”
Mattingly is right about the risks. But there is a difference between taking risks with potentially infected players and taking risks exposing those same players to someone else’s team. You do that in the NFL and you’re going to have some issues down the line. Executives, coaches and club owners in this league know it, even if their counterparts in other sports don’t.
That’s what baseball has taught the NFL — how to not be that league, or that team, or that player. Don’t put yourself in that predicament. The one where you turn labor negotiations into such a public brawl that it threatens to extinguish yet another season. The one where one of your youngest stars (Juan Soto) tests positive out of the gate and instantaneously exposes a gap in your system. And the one where you have an alarming number of positive tests on your team, but you press forward into a game because, well, it’s all a big risk anyway.
I have no doubt that Major League Baseball is making some mistakes that will ultimately help the NFL. But I also have no doubt that there’s a reason MLB lost its perch as the No. 1 sport in America and has long been left in the NFL’s rearview mirror. When it comes to the larger picture of what is at stake, the NFL has always steered clear of the line of ineptitude.
The Marlins and Major League Baseball crossed it quickly in 2020. And if anything, that will serve as one last daily reminder to the NFL of how important it is to get all of this as right as it can, as often as it can.
But gloom from Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report:
@mikefreemanNFL
I don’t think people understand just how many NFL GMs, other front office officials and coaches believe having an NFL season during a pandemic is dead wrong.
Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com thinks the NFL should have bubbled.
As the NFL was finalizing its plans for the 2020 season amid the coronavirus pandemic last month, epidemiologist Zachary Binney advocated a severe strategy to anyone who would listen. The league, Binney said, would need 32 self-contained “market bubbles” to keep its essential staff healthy during COVID-19 spikes this fall and winter.
The NFL and NFL Players Association chose differently, of course. And already, their decision to give players and coaches access to local communities has drawn new scrutiny after baseball’s Miami Marlins experienced a large team outbreak less than a week into the start of the MLB season. NFL medical officer Allen Sills said Monday that the league’s plan amounts to a “virtual football bubble,” but its essential structure — strict rules while at the team facilities and stadiums, with guidelines against high-risk behavior when in the community — makes the NFL’s defenses fundamentally similar to those that have already broken down in baseball.
“If you’re the NFL and you’re looking at what happened with the Marlins,” Binney said, “you have to expect that something like this is going to happen to you — unless you are able to change course, reenter negotiations with the [NFL Players Association] and negotiate something like that home-market bubble.”
Such a dramatic shift, just as players are reporting to training camp, seems unlikely. Binney acknowledged “it would be incredibly difficult,” and during an interview with ESPN, Sills avoided direct answers to multiple questions about the possibility of a bubble concept at this stage. While saying that “all options remain on the table,” Sills emphasized that the NFL’s current plan is geared to identify infections early to prevent spread rather than toward trying to seal out the virus entirely.
Indeed, a market bubble would require each team to house hundreds of employees — players, coaches, medical officials and other staffers — all day, every day for at least five months. It also would require intricate planning to accommodate game officials, many of whom have other jobs during the week, and others who are essential to travel and playing games in stadiums across the country. In theory, a market bubble would prevent everyone from coming into contact with the virus. In practice, the league and its players ultimately decided it was both undesirable and unrealistic in the structure of a 16-game season.
“All ideas were on the table for discussion,” Sills said, “and I think we landed at the place where everyone felt the most comfortable in terms of the safety balanced against the pragmatic aspects.”
Early returns from the NBA, WNBA and professional soccer indicate that bubbles work. The Marlins’ experience has exposed the flaws of anything short of that. Can the NFL avoid the same essential flaw and make it through training camp, let alone a 16-game season and a full postseason, without a major outbreak? Binney, an assistant professor of quantitative theory and methods at Oxford College of Emory University, has his doubts.
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for Dr. Sills and all the work that he and all of his colleagues at the league have put into trying to come up with the best plan that they can under the circumstances,” Binney said. “But with that said, if you’re going to call the NFL’s plan a ‘virtual football bubble,’ then you have to call MLB’s plan a ‘virtual baseball bubble.’ [The NFL] would have to expect that the Dolphins are going to experience a different result than the Marlins, when I think, if anything, I think it’s going to be more difficult for the Dolphins because of the sheer number of people who are going to have to behave and not engage in risky behavior, as well as the additional close contact in football that doesn’t exist in baseball.”
The NFL has sent teams hundreds of pages of memos with instructions for retrofitting their team facilities, limiting in-person meetings and even removing shower heads to ensure social distancing in the shower room. It is requiring players to produce three negative COVID-19 tests over four days before they set foot in the team facility for training camp, and then will subject them to daily testing for at least two weeks. When players leave the facility, they will be governed by rules — enforceable by fines or possibly suspensions — that prohibit activities such as visiting nightclubs with more than 15 people or joining a religious service attended by more than 25% of the venue’s capacity.
Those rules constitute the NFL’s definition of a “virtual football bubble” because, Sills said, “everyone in our team environment shares the same risk [and] the same responsibility to each other.”
But even if most everyone follows the guidelines, Binney said, it would take only a few mistakes to put an entire team at risk.
“I think you can think of it like an NFL defense,” he said. “If you’ve got nine guys sticking to the program and two guys out there freelancing, the opposing offense is not going to have a difficult time scoring a touchdown. I think that analogy carries over. You really need everybody on the same page and pulling in the same direction.”
In the absence of a sealed bubble, the NFL and NFLPA worked to ensure testing results within 24 hours from BioReference Laboratories, the same testing firm used by the NBA and WNBA. They also installed a technology-based contact tracing program to aid the next steps after a positive test result. Their joint coronavirus task force contracted with Kinexon, a company that produces tracking devices, for a leaguewide order of proximity recording devices that accurately measure physical distancing, according to NFL chief information officer Michelle McKenna.
All team employees, and some media members, will be required to wear the devices while in the perimeter of the team facility. The proximity data will be uploaded to IQVIA, a company that manages all the NFL’s health and safety information, and can be accessed within minutes after a positive test by each team’s infection control officer (ICO).
Using the data, the ICO can identify anyone who was within 6 feet of the infected person for at least 15 minutes during the previous 48 hours. The policy calls for the team to “notify those individuals of their potential exposure and probable need for quarantine or isolation pending the results of testing,” but the ICO is given some leeway to exclude people who were, for example, within 6 feet of each other but on opposite sides of a wall.
The devices also are equipped to give individuals an audio or video warning that they are within 6 feet of someone, providing a real-time education on appropriate social and physical distancing. Teams will receive data reports that can help identify problem spots in their facilities where people are consistently congregating.
“This in a way becomes a social distance feedback device as well,” Sills said. “This feedback might be even more important than contact tracing because it gives us a chance to do something proactively that maybe reduces our chances of infection.”
The devices will be removed, however, when the user leaves the team facility. And for parts of every day this summer, fall and winter, team employees will be counted on to avoid a virus that is running rampant through parts of the United States. For the NFL to function over the next five months, its entire ecosystem will have to behave much differently than the country at large.
The plan probably would have been sufficient if the infection rate were lower around the country, Binney said. Sills has said the NFL hopes to set an example for the country on how to “mitigate risk and to coexist with this virus.” Without a bubble, as unrealistic as it might be, Binney said those efforts might prove futile.
“I’m not saying it would be easy,” he said. “It would be incredibly difficult. But this is the position that our country’s response to the virus has put us in. It didn’t need to be this way, or this hard or this dangerous, but it is. And there’s nothing you can do about that reality, unfortunately.”
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