Ongoing COVID-19 Impact

Time to Mo Vaughn

RIP Dernell
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Mar 24, 2008
7,204
Devil's advocate--are you saying there should be an automatic cancellation of game if there's a positive test?
Functionally yes, with a very small window. You basically need 4-5 days since exposure for an accurate test result. So if you get a positive test, team isolates for 4 or 5 days (I would pick 5 for greater accuracy, but the NBA bubble used 4), and continue to test along the way. If everyone is clear then, you can play.

Under this protocol, Cam's positive was too close to allow the Chiefs game to happen, but might have saved the Denver game this week. If no player has been exposed to Gilmore since Monday, and everyone isolates then negative testing players on Saturday could be allowed to play Sunday.
 

BaseballJones

ivanvamp
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Oct 1, 2015
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I rewatched the KC game the other day and posted this in the game goat thread:

“4th possession for KC...NE defense in a very tough spot at this point. Great play by Gilmore to punch the ball out. Laughing at the ref yelling "WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!" with his mask down, screaming at a pile of people. I mean...what is the point of these guys wearing masks if they're going to be screaming in the faces of the players like that?”

So the refs aren’t ok with coaches yelling at them without masks, but in a pile of players, the refs can yell at the players from two feet away without THEIR masks on?

And this makes sense how?
 

tims4wins

PN23's replacement
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Jul 15, 2005
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I rewatched the KC game the other day and posted this in the game goat thread:

“4th possession for KC...NE defense in a very tough spot at this point. Great play by Gilmore to punch the ball out. Laughing at the ref yelling "WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!" with his mask down, screaming at a pile of people. I mean...what is the point of these guys wearing masks if they're going to be screaming in the faces of the players like that?”

So the refs aren’t ok with coaches yelling at them without masks, but in a pile of players, the refs can yell at the players from two feet away without THEIR masks on?

And this makes sense how?
It’s all a joke. Optics.
 

BaseballJones

ivanvamp
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Oct 1, 2015
24,376
It’s all a joke. Optics.
Three screen shots of that moment I'm talking about...

Official on the left. Mask down, face exposed. Ref in the middle, about to make the call, preparing to yank his mask down.

34844

Mask now off, preparing to yell.

34845

Mask totally off, yelling "White! White! White!" at the top of his lungs while his face is like 2-3 feet from a half dozen players.

34846
 

djbayko

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Jul 18, 2005
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I rewatched the KC game the other day and posted this in the game goat thread:

“4th possession for KC...NE defense in a very tough spot at this point. Great play by Gilmore to punch the ball out. Laughing at the ref yelling "WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!" with his mask down, screaming at a pile of people. I mean...what is the point of these guys wearing masks if they're going to be screaming in the faces of the players like that?”

So the refs aren’t ok with coaches yelling at them without masks, but in a pile of players, the refs can yell at the players from two feet away without THEIR masks on?

And this makes sense how?
None of it makes sense. It's all theater.
 

soxhop411

news aggravator
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Dec 4, 2009
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this is certainly sustainable and will totally not change between now and next Sunday.
 

Ale Xander

Hamilton
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Oct 31, 2013
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View attachment 34888
this is certainly sustainable and will totally not change between now and next Sunday.
team schedules for November and December will be like this:

Sunday - game
Monday- rest/film
Tuesday-practice
Wednesday-walkthrough
Thursday-game
Friday - rest/film
Saturday -practice
Sunday-walkthrough
Monday-game
short "normal" week
Sunday-game

rinse/repeat
 

E5 Yaz

Transcends message boarding
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So like for the team's whos games are moving up to next week, don't they normally have advanced scouts watching there next few opponents...so now no advanced scouting. This is such a mess because they never had a plan, how did they not have a plan?
"Having a plan" wouldn't have mattered. You can't plan for an NFL schedule like you can for any of the other major sports, which play multiple times a week. The NBA and NHL put their teams in bubbles because they had a reduced schedule. MLB was very fortunate, but they reduced their schedule as well.

The NFL has to schedule one game a week for 4-plus months in an interlocking schedule. There's no plan that would made sense once they decided to go full-bore into a regular schedule. They can't put teams teams in bubbles for that long.

The biggest problem with what they just released is that it suggests no further teams getting positive tests.

Fangio just today called out his own players for complaining about having to practice all week for what turns out to be their bye
 

Silverdude2167

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Oct 9, 2006
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"Having a plan" wouldn't have mattered. You can't plan for an NFL schedule like you can for any of the other major sports, which play multiple times a week. The NBA and NHL put their teams in bubbles because they had a reduced schedule. MLB was very fortunate, but they reduced their schedule as well.

The NFL has to schedule one game a week for 4-plus months in an interlocking schedule. There's no plan that would made sense once they decided to go full-bore into a regular schedule. They can't put teams teams in bubbles for that long.

The biggest problem with what they just released is that it suggests no further teams getting positive tests.

Fangio just today called out his own players for complaining about having to practice all week for what turns out to be their bye
The issue is they could have seen this coming and really should have two extra byes built into the schedule...and then you just move this game into that bye instead of moving around 8 games.

That is a pretty simple plan that was missed only by being completely ignorant of reality.
 

E5 Yaz

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The issue is they could have seen this coming and really should have two extra byes built into the schedule...and then you just move this game into that bye instead of moving around 8 games.

That is a pretty simple plan that was missed only by being completely ignorant of reality.
If, of course, the two teams involved had the same bye
 

swiftaw

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Jan 31, 2009
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Yeah, To be clear I mean two league-wide byes later in the year.
Yeah, instead of doing 16 games in 17 weeks they could’ve done 16 games in 19 weeks. If they remove the extra week between conference championships and Super Bowl that would only add 1 week to the season meaning the Super Bowl would be Presidents’ Day weekend.
 

E5 Yaz

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And the Titans, who likely won't play as scheduled Tuesday, will already be in the shitter. God help them if they ... or a future opponent ... has to have a game postponed.

You could have a league-wide bye week slated inbetween every regular season week and still not have every contingency covered
 

Papelbon's Poutine

Homeland Security
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Dec 4, 2005
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Has a single player in the NFL that's tested positive had any serious symptoms?
A large portion of this pandemic has been that people take it that directly - to the one person. You need to think in exponentials and asymptomatic cases only add to that. Even if one player has, asymptomatic or no serious symptoms, they still are exposing everyone they come into contact with and then raise that to the n value. The only way, short of a vaccine, to get out of this and kill it was quarantine, so that it has nowhere to go. That's essentially what the NBA and NHL did. The MLB should have realized they were between a rock and a hard place, being so close to season starting and wanting some games, etc. The NFL had enough time and certainly enough money they could have goddamn built a facility if they couldn't find one to house the players and even their families with them, since they wouldn't needed to have to build full stadiums for fans etc. Somewhere here, I forget which thread, someone posted a over shot of a facility that could handle at least 7-8 fields. They had options here. They did some good steps with the contact electronics, etc, but they're fucking up the folow though and they built no contingency plan, most likely purely out of hubris.
 

joe dokes

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Jul 18, 2005
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There are only so many ways to try to pull off a football season in a country that’s being overrun with a pandemic. The NFL attempted zero of those. This was not just because the few options available are difficult and annoying and require massive compromises and collective action, although that surely didn’t make them more appealing. It’s because the very act of doing that work would be an admission of vulnerability; the facile conceit that makes football work is that the people who play and coach are just different, and both less human and somehow superhuman for it. Every other American sports league has had to warp and wrench itself out of order just to have some kind of season. The NFL, being the NFL, was only and always going to do it without changing a thing.
This isn’t to say that the NFL wasn’t willing to do new things to make the season work, because the NFL was and is always eager to do things. It’s just that the things the NFL did—feats of high-tech hygiene theater, weird stagey rationalization, statements written in the league’s trademark military-adjacent syntax—reflected the extent to which the league’s power players had refused to do the single most important thing they could have done: learn how this pandemic works and act accordingly. There was a daunting challenge buried in all that: if teams responded to clubhouse outbreaks per pandemic-management best practices, this season would quickly become untenable. But also: what if everyone involved assessed the challenge in full, weighed the various options, and just decided not to care? How might that work?
The NFL, under Roger Goodell, has always positioned itself as a sort of unofficial branch of the military, a gambit so oafishly overdetermined and under-reasoned that it was both ridiculous and kind of poignant. This time, though, the childish parody and the object of its devotion traded places. Trump’s administration approached the pandemic in the same way that NFL owners have traditionally approached everything—high-handedly, begrudgingly, and blithely secure in the knowledge that the consequences of their posturing and inaction were for other people to bear.
[snip]
Substituting wishful thinking and casual eugenics for actual action can’t work. But until the inexorable consequences arrive, that approach offers the comfort of the familiar and requires nothing more than a self-serving sort of faith. (“Any malcontents,” Mississippi State coach Mike Leach said after his team got wiped out by Kentucky last weekend, “we’re going to have to purge a couple of those.”) The critical problem here is not that American culture abhors even the appearance of weakness, but about how much is built upon that belief, and about how that belief rewrites an increasingly brutal status quo into a legible natural order. Because the strongest win, the winners are the strongest. The diers mostly just die. If you believe this, a pandemic isn’t a problem to solve. It’s just two-a-days.
https://defector.com/were-on-to-cincinnati/
 

Mooch

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Jul 15, 2005
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Anthony Sherman of the Chiefs was just placed on the COVID list. I wonder if we're about to see some fallout from the Pats game coming due for KC or if it's totally unrelated.
 

DennyDoyle'sBoil

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Sep 9, 2008
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I wonder if this is an added concern. Teams just playing out the string with records that make it less likely to go to the playoffs may not have quite the same level of vigilance on the protocols. Probably not a big deal. Every player still has reason to play and to stay as careful as possible. And this didn’t seem to be a problem in baseball.

But if you’re a 4-0 team I can see your coaches being able to stand up and say look we are a championship team and any one of you can blow it by not adhering to the protocols. It is harder for the teams with bad records to make that case in quite the same way.

That said most of the teams affected so far are good teams but it may be worth watching.