The NFL is using MLB’s coronavirus playbook. So how the heck will that work, exactly?
The NFL, with active rosters nearly twice as big and a sport that requires infinitely more close contact, is essentially using the coronavirus playbook of Major League Baseball, which lasted all of about a week before being pushed to the brink of abject failure.
Oh, and also: Health experts largely expect more coronavirus cases around the country during NFL season than baseball is dealing with now.
What could possibly go wrong?
America’s strongest sports passion — not to mention the Chiefs’ hopes of running back their Super Bowl LIV championship — is essentially resting on hope. Think about that for a moment.
Zach Binney has, and the epidemiologist at Emory University put the NFL’s chances of completing a full season below 50 percent.
“I think luck is going to play a role,” he said. “I think how strict adherence is to protocols is going to play a role. I think testing turnaround is going to play a role. I really don’t know.”
Here’s one good sign: The NFL Players Association said this week that 56 of about 2,600 players on active rosters tested positive for COVID-19 since reporting for training camp. That’s about 2 percent of those players, and less than a 1 percent rate on total tests administered. A very good sign.
Here’s a less than good sign: Major League Baseball has had similarly encouraging rates at various times, and recently had to shut down two teams, with a majority of Americans polled believing the league should stop the entire season.
Baseball is dear to a lot of us. Football is an intimate part of much more of our lives.
The stakes are enormous, with safety nets nonexistent. Through simple luck of the calendar, the NFL was best positioned of any major sports league to prepare and learn from others’ successes and failures.
At this moment, the league’s plan is essentially to mimic MLB — the country’s least successful league in this regard. This is a major problem, and one more people should be recognizing.
Lets stay fair here. The bubble setups of MLS, the NBA and NHL are functionally impossible for the NFL to replicate.
NBA teams, for instance, were initially permitted just 37 people inside the bubble, including players. That wouldn’t cover even an active NFL roster.
But here’s a different form of math: 37 people with 22 teams is 814 humans inside the NBA bubble. An NFL team would need a fraction of that to create its own bubble. Logistical issues would exist in creating separate bubbles for each of the NFL’s 32 teams, but the money, motivation and resources like hotel space are plentiful.
All NFL players and staff wear contact tracers, and the league’s testing turnaround is generally faster than MLB’s.
That helps on both ends — quicker test results mean less exposure, and better tracing means enhanced ability to follow an invisible virus.
But on some level, this is choosing between sizes of holes for your boat. You can make the right choice but still sink.
This week, in a conversation with The Star, Chiefs general manager Brett Veach pointed to a few potential advantages for his sport, including less travel and an assumed personal responsibility by players who’ve now seen how close baseball was to shuttering.
Baseball teams spend three or four nights in a hotel every road series. That’s a lot of downtime. NFL teams typically arrive around 4 p.m. the day before a game, with mandatory meetings and curfews accounting for the rest of the night. They wake up, play, then head straight to the airport to fly home.
“Not to say that’s going to be the answer that makes us navigate the entire season, but I think it helps,” Veach said.
Potential disasters are everywhere, though. Binney is among those who say the risk of travel has been largely exaggerated, with no outbreaks so far tied to an airport or flight. Besides, baseball and football teams fly charter, often bypassing terminals used by the general public.
But here’s something that baseball will soon face, and then football: What happens when a team is buried in the standings? Do the players practice the same level of discipline? How will they navigate increased temptation, both from the end of a long season and with no postseason reward to play for?
For example: The Chiefs and Miami Dolphins are scheduled to play Dec. 13. What if the Chiefs are 9-3 and playing for the No. 1 seed and the Dolphins are 3-9 and playing out the string? Wouldn’t it make sense that some Dolphins players might loosen their behavior?
And what if that means spread during the game, which could then affect the Chiefs’ playoff positioning, playoff roster, or worse?
“It’s a good question,” Veach said. “I honestly couldn’t answer how you protect that environment.”
If that seems like too much searching for a problem, consider that the above scenario is actually better than an alternative that’s just as likely: that it’s the protocols, not player behavior, driving outbreaks.
There are reports of the Miami Marlins going out, for instance, but reporting by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch debunked the widely circulated theory that a casino trip caused the St. Louis Cardinals’ outbreak.
As best as anyone can tell, the virus was unwittingly introduced to the Cardinals by an asymptomatic individual, and then spread. There is nothing in the protocols that can guarantee the same won’t happen in football.
But lets leave that aside for a moment. Lets imagine a world in which the protocols are perfect and assume it’s all about individual behavior and responsibility.
A significant part of the NFL’s messaging has centered around its players practicing better self-discipline than baseball players. But what evidence exists to support that claim?
If anything, NFL teams could be navigating even more risk than baseball because the operation is so much bigger. Twice as many players, more coaches, more trainers, more everything.
“That means there’s more chance for the virus to be introduced,” Binney said. “It’s just a number’s game.”
The other obvious obstacle is the nature of the sport. Data on exactly how the virus spreads is still somewhat inconclusive, but a center fielder can probably play with a much lower chance of exposure than a center.
The CDC guideline about risk increasing with contact closer than six feet for more than 15 minutes might be fine for you or me in normal life, but Binney used the example of a defensive lineman needing to assume he’s been exposed if he finds out the offensive lineman he just played against tested positive.
“The type of contact does matter in that,” he said. “It’s a lot worse to be six inches from somebody than six feet from somebody, and it’s a lot worse if you’re breathing hard than if you’re standing silently.”
If this all sounds pessimistic, well, it’s also reality. This year, reality usually stinks.
But as we’ve seen with the response and case management here in the U.S. compared with other countries, the only way to address the virus effectively is to talk about and act on it intelligently.
NFL players must be disciplined when outside team facilities, but expecting no letdowns among the thousands involved is unrealistic. Besides, self-discipline is more of a basic necessity than the key to a complete season.
The success or failure of America’s favorite form of entertainment will rely on individual choices, protocols that are essentially educated guesses, test results coming back quickly and consistently and a million factors outside the control of anyone associated with the control-obsessed NFL.
That’s a lot of ifs, so it’s no wonder many are choosing not to participate.
Everyone has his own unique and personal reason to play or not, and there are no clean comparisons across sports, but more than 60 NFL players chose to opt out of the 2020 season compared to fewer than two dozen in baseball.
Maybe that means nothing, or maybe it can be explained by spread being more prevalent in a contact sport.
Worse for the league is if it can be explained by NFL players seeing what’s happened in baseball and believing things could be worse in their own sport.
“I am a big NFL fan,” Binney said. “I want them to be able to play, but I’m very worried. I’m very concerned that if Major League Baseball is having this degree of difficulty, and the NFL is trying to essentially run their playbook, I think you have to assume that they’re going to run into similar problems at some point.”