At first glance, the COVID news in the NFL is pretty good. Tonight, the league will play its 133rd game of the season, Patriots at Jets, meaning that 52 percent of the regular season has been played, and every game that has been postponed due to COVID has been rescheduled during the regular season by shuffling byes and some teams’ schedules.
Now the sobering news: The league has 123 games left in the last eight weeks of the season, and rescheduling them during the season will be exceedingly hard. Only 10 of the league’s 32 bye-week slots are left: four in Week 10, four in Week 11, two in Week 13. The league, wisely, will not have a team play two games in a week, so that means that if any of the 22 teams that have used their bye have a debilitating outbreak, the NFL would either force the team to play with a major influx of practice-squadders OR have to push a game to a potential Week 18 on Jan. 10. Or perhaps not play it. One of the reasons the NFL is considering adding an eighth playoff team per conference at the league’s virtual owners meeting on Tuesday is to account for issues that might arise if two or more contenders do not play a full 16-game schedule.
“Say the seventh seed plays 15 games and is 9-6,” one official involved in these discussions about the extra playoff team told me. “Say there’s an eighth team that goes 9-7. In a seven-team field, the 9-6 team makes it by winning percentage over the 9-7 team. In essence, you’re penalizing the team that played a full schedule and won as many games. This would give some flexibility if there’s an outbreak somewhere.”
On Friday, I looked at the list of positive COVID tests around the NFL from that day—which includes not just the estimated 70 players per team but also the 100 people per team (coaches, trainers, equipment people) who tested positive that day. There were 15. Consider how careful teams are being, and how much they’re policing this. Fifteen seems like a lot. That occurred from Thursday’s testing around the league. Thursday was the first day in the pandemic when more than 120,000 Americans tested positive for the virus. Friday and Saturday also had more than 120,000 positive cases in the U.S. Seven NFL teams play in states that set single-day records for positive COVID tests. Starting QBs Matthew Stafford and Baker Mayfield both have missed or will miss five practice days because of close-contact with a person who tested positive. Stafford was negative for five straight days and thus got to play Sunday at Minnesota. Mayfield, if he’s negative this week, will play Sunday against Houston after missing much of the practice week—like Stafford did.
With the outbreak at a record high, and the byes almost gone, it seems logical to expect real disruption to the schedule soon, either forcing a Week 18 or chipping away at team schedules so they don’t all play 16 games. I’m told adding a Week 18 is more likely, at least as a first option; of course, if a team has to be gone for two weeks or more, Week 18 alone would not cover that. But the thought of continuing to push the season back by adding extra weeks in January is not desirable either.
One interesting point: The Rams have not had a player test positive since the beginning of August, which is pretty amazing—14 weeks without any of the estimated 70 players on the active roster or practice squad getting COVID. How have they achieved this? The Rams, before players reported in late July, constructed a gigantic white tent, with no walls, outside their practice facility in Thousand Oaks, Calif. All in-person team and position-group meetings, weightlifting sessions, and team meals (prepackaged) are held outside. Ninety percent of Rams players’ lives when on site are spent outside. It helps, of course, that Thousand Oaks has had 200 straight days with a temperature of at least 70 degrees. But unquestionably the Rams’ good fortune at avoiding COVID has something to do with being distanced, with masks on, in the open air. Hard for the Bills or Bears or Vikings to do that, of course. But that was a very bright idea by the Rams, deciding to conduct virtually all team business outside. They also, as an aside, made some days (Mondays, for instance) virtual days so players and coaches can be isolated.
Weird year. But I’m betting those who adjust the best, and those who don’t stress over the infinitesimal but important little virus-related rules, will be some of those left standing in January.
