NFL’s new covid approach: smart for business, bad for public health

The NFL’s new covid approach is smart for making money — and bad for public health

By Jerry Brewer
Columnist
Today at 5:00 a.m. EST

It seems the NFL’s owners, players and coaches are done with covid-19. They don’t want it interrupting their season, messing with their money or delivering any kind of bad news. Omicron variant? This ain’t no spelling bee; they’re sticking to football.

The NFL — misguided, shortsighted, danger-seeking fools, all of them — is behaving exactly the way a contagious, constantly mutating virus wants people to act.

Just like the rest of society, the sports world is amid a wave of holiday-season coronavirus infections, leaving team personnel sick and altering schedules in just about every professional and major college league. The chaos signals a need to rethink strategies and reduce the risk of a spread that could lead to temporary stoppages. Or, if you’re participating in the NFL, the concern is more about eliminating the annoyance.

The league and its players’ association have come up with a lazy solution: willful ignorance. At a time when the sport should deploy its resources to test as thoroughly as possible and seek clarity about the challenges it faces now and for the remainder of the season, the two sides have agreed to do less, know less and try to plow through the final weeks of the 2021 campaign.

They will characterize it otherwise, but the facts don’t add up to their claims. On Saturday, a deal was made to adjust the NFL’s protocols to test vaccinated players and team personnel for the coronavirus only when they have symptoms. Unvaccinated players remain subject to daily testing, so the incentive to get the shots has increased, in essence. Get your vaccination card, and the NFL will stamp it with permission to be more negligent than it has allowed at any other time during the pandemic.

Look, covid-19 fatigue exists for everyone. And there must be stable ground somewhere between the extremes of the lockdown faction and the live carefree faction. I will give the NFL credit for taking a reasonable risk by tweaking its return-to-play requirements after a player tests positive. There’s now a faster path to getting back on the field that could be of great benefit to asymptomatic players who have a low viral load and test negative soon after contracting the virus. Previously, the NFL had a higher threshold for returning, which included two negative tests 24 hours apart. Now a player could get back to his team with two negative tests that can be taken concurrently, and they could be administered as soon as a day after the positive test.

Those measures make sense and represent an appropriate, well-thought way to balance health and safety with the frustration of the situation the NFL claims to be facing right now: dozens of asymptomatic players who tested positive and are sitting in isolation feeling good. Those players are upset because they’re competitive, and they’re trying to help their teams get into the playoffs or earn a higher postseason seed. And with the league inching closer to having to forfeit games, their paychecks are at stake, too.

So it’s no great surprise that, in a union with nearly 1,700 active players each week, it’s hard to pin down what’s best for the athletes. The union began last week complaining about the NFL’s decision not to test daily this season, and it ended with an agreement to test only when symptoms exists, like most people would. It’s a wild shift but a very human one. And the league, with its business and its product (not its people) top of mind, is quite happy with those terms.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones hinted at the possibility of a shift during a local radio appearance this past week.

“I think we will get to a point probably this week that we’ll only test if symptomatic, that’s if you’ve been vaccinated,” Jones said on 105.3 in Dallas. “That’s a good thing. Test when you’re symptomatic, and that’s it.”

The fix was in long before that final negotiation Saturday. Never mind that asymptomatic carriers can still spread the virus. Never mind that NFL players aren’t walled off from society, and so the decisions those people make have the potential to affect more than just the league. Never mind that football, at its core, is a sport that has long rewarded players for toughing it out, taping it up and keeping whatever’s wrong with their body quiet.

You want to have a covid-19 honor system in the NFL? This amounts to a don’t-ask, don’t-tell coronavirus policy. It’s dangerous. It’s foolish. If you can trust that the league’s 94 percent vaccination rate is accurate — if you can believe Antonio Brown’s fake vaccination claim is an aberration and not a prevalent scam — then the NFL probably finishes the season without a major incident. Probably. But it would be much wiser to know the severity of the problem now, mitigate it and send an honest message to society. Instead, all parties are willing to let the virus wander through team facilities however it wishes and lean on the hope that a sport full of young, fit men will be just fine — and that a fan base desperate for finality won’t care.

When you hear the NFL use the words “strategic, targeted spot testing” in reference to its approach, don’t be fooled. The only strategy is finishing what it started. From the beginning, when sports returned to play through the pandemic, testing and early virus detection have been critical to the idea that they can play on and keep people safe. It’s a luxury of their lucrative, influential place in society, and the privilege should not be discarded so irresponsibly. We live in a world in which so many groups would love to have the resources to track the virus daily and make an educated plan to keep people healthy. The NFL can do that, but it’s opting to be covid blind.

“I would not describe it as that we’re stopping testing or we’re doing less testing,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said during a conference call with reporters. “I would simply say that we’re trying to test smarter and test in a more strategic fashion.”

It’s smart if you don’t want the hassle and care mostly about money. Other than that, it’s the most reckless thing a sports league has done during this difficult time.