Rams T Whitworth, Family Test Positive for Novel Coronavirus

Howard Balzer

https://www.si.com/nfl/cardinals/news/andrew-whitworth-family-test-positive

As the NFL and NFLPA continue to work toward making work environments safe for training camp, just how dangerous the novel coronavirus can be was experienced in a huge way by Los Angeles Rams tackle Andrew Whitworth.

During a conference call Friday with NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith and union president JC Tretter, the starting center for the Cleveland Browns, Whitworth joined the call to talk about the recent harrowing experience of his family.

Whitworth, the Rams’ player rep, opened by saying, “Our leadership, JC and those guys, have done a tremendous job and continue to be a solid voice for us. You’re going to have to make good decisions and have to be careful outside the building. We’re talking about things as simple as going to lunch with someone because all it takes is one exposure.”

He then explained: “My story is an example of that. We had a family member that simply just went to lunch with a friend and as innocent as it can be a couple days later we were traveling all together and she started to not feel well, and ended up deciding to get a test and the next thing we know, she had it. A couple days later my wife and I had it, a couple days later our kids had it so we were about 7-for-7 at that point. Then unfortunately we had just visited my wife’s family and we were traveling with them as well and her mom and dad both got it.

“Obviously, people of an older age it seems to be much tougher; it definitely was on them and unfortunately her dad got to a state where he had to be hospitalized. Luckily for us it’s such a blessing we got him home about four or five days ago. He’s home with us now. We’re very blessed to have him and for him to be OK. But its definitely a scary thing and you realize how contagious this really is. It doesn’t take much and it can spread like wildfire. For us, it’s affected us personally, scary but for our family, our kids we ended up OK everything seemed to go pretty normal pretty mild case, but for her parents it wasn’t that way.”

That drives home what the players are facing as they advocate for a return to play that is as safe as possible considering that is many cases not only players, but their families will be traveling to their team’s city, in which there are currently serious hot spots.

Dan Graziano@DanGrazianoESPN
NFLPA prez JC Tretter: “We’ve had coaches say the protocols are too much to ask, coaches come forward and saying, ‘Everyone’s going to get sick, so we might as well all get sick together.’ Those attitudes can’t happen. There are consequences to getting sick.”

Before the story broke there were some rumors, which turned out to be wrong in a lot of ways. Nothing wrong with posting rumors–but the real WaPo story sorted that out and killed a lot of those rumors.

But looking back, some of the rumors were just weird, and I put that on the people who tweeted them.

Like this guy (it’s in this thread). Nominally, the opening bit isn’t so bad:

Harrison Weinhold@RadioHarrison
This will be a story about how the front office for the past 10 years has hidden and protected men in the building against sexual assault and harassment allegations and legal action. Look at recent firings and retirings if you need specific names, but they’ll be out soon

Okay. Pretty much substantiated stuff.

But then there’s this (same guy):

Front office and team personnel fucking media members in exchange for scoops and leaks. Protecting leadership, coaches, players from getting in trouble with their wives, etc and then using that information for blackmail, leaks and to keep people obedient (Gruden, Allen, McLovin).

It’s not just that he named Gruden. Who, turns out, has nothing to do with any of this.

Look at what he did. He has the female reporters who complained of harassment having sex with team officials to get info.

He turned the entire issue upside down. He has female reporters as aggressively using sex to get info–when the ACTUAL story was that female reporters were being harassed while trying to do their jobs.

I suspect this guy just made that up based on his own “hunches.”

This guy is an EXAMPLE of the mindset that’s being complained about.

Trump’s Fumbling of the Coronavirus Crisis Could Kill the College Football Season
The president is marinating in a midsummer mess of his own creation, and his epic failure of leadership will result in a ruined college football season.

https://www.si.com/college/2020/07/16/trump-fumble-coronavirus-response-college-football-season

One of Donald Trump’s favorite things to do as President has been visiting college football games in friendly locations, bathing his eternally needy ego in applause and affirmation. Last season alone, he attended the LSU-Alabama game in November, the Army-Navy game in December, and the College Football Playoff championship between LSU and Clemson in January. The First Football Fan was nearly as ubiquitous within the sport as Kirk Herbstreit.

That’s going to be a difficult vanity play to repeat in 2020.

There will be no college football crowds of the usual size. There might not be college football, period. Pessimism percolates as the time for solutions dwindles. We are speeding in the wrong direction as a nation in terms of combating the coronavirus pandemic, and one of the cultural casualties of American casualness is an endeavor millions of us want and every college athletic department needs.

If the season dies, we know who had the biggest hand in killing any chance of it happening: Donald Trump.

When he inevitably gets around to Twitter-ranting about what has happened to the sport, Trump should instead do what he never does—accept some accountability for the state of affairs. By blowing the summer he’s jeopardized the fall, doing more to endanger the college football season than anyone in America.

Slow to respond, quick to downplay the risk, unwilling to create a national strategy, quite willing to attack governors who took the pandemic seriously, pushing for premature openings of states, flaunting a no-mask stance for months and turning that into a belligerent political statement, Trump and his ideologues are now marinating in a midsummer mess of their own creation. What an epic failure of leadership, one that will deprive Trump of his cherished autumn fealty festivals at a packed football stadium.

As athletic departments do their best to cloister athletes and drive down positive test counts, the spread of disease in regions around many campuses is like wildfire. And on Thursday, the decision makers in college sports laid out the current crisis in stark terms.

A graphic in the NCAA’s latest set of return-to-sport guidelines was a reality slap. The graphic showed where the United States was in terms of confirmed cases in late April, when the NCAA began crafting procedures for how college athletics can resume in the fall. It showed the projected downward trend line for where the U.S. was heading, if it sustained initiatives it had begun and reopened with commensurate pragmatism and care. And it showed how our numbers went the other way while Europe, Canada and Japan flattened the curve.

Graphic showing 7-day rolling count of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Japan
NCAA

From the NCAA report: “As the graph below indicates, when the NCAA began discussions about return of sport after the cancellation of 2020 winter and spring championships, there was an expectation that such a return would take place within a context that assumed syndromic surveillance, national testing strategies and enhanced contact tracing. Although testing and contact tracing infrastructure have expanded considerably, the variations in approach to reopening America for business and recreation have correlated with a considerable spike in cases in recent weeks. This requires that schools contemplate a holistic strategy that includes testing to return to sports with a high contact risk.”

The rest of the NCAA document, and a corresponding set of policies from the Power 5 conferences that was obtained earlier Thursday by my Sports Illustrated colleague Ross Dellenger, portray the daunting task facing college sports—and primarily football—this fall. Crafted with the input of dozens of health experts, the two documents lay out parameters that make it difficult to envision a fall season being played without massive interruption. If it’s played at all.

Consider this, from the NCAA guidelines: “When an athlete tests positive for COVID-19, local public health officials must be notified, and contact tracing protocols must be put in place. All individuals with a high risk of exposure should be placed in quarantine for 14 days as per CDC guidance. This includes members of opposing teams after competition. The difficulty is defining individuals with a high risk of exposure, and in some cases, this could mean an entire team (or teams).”

So, this is a potential scenario as the schedule currently stands: Ohio State plays at Michigan State Oct. 17. Afterward, a Buckeye who saw significant action in the game tests positive. The entire team could then be subject to missing the matchup the following week at Penn State, and the Spartans could be decimated for their game the following week against Indiana. And who knows about the week after that.

Virus spread had been sufficiently contained in some other countries to allow sports to be played, thus far without disastrous fallout. The U.S. has lost all containment, yet still is hoping to play games. Professional leagues are one thing—well-paid adults represented by unions are making their own choices. College athletics, which many in America consider a raw deal for the star athletes in revenue-producing sports, are something else entirely.

Even if everything were going smoothly, the college football optics would not be great. Things are not going smoothly in Donald Trump’s America.

From July 8-15, the average daily confirmed virus cases in the U.S. was 63,018, according to The New York Times. That’s the highest seven-day average to date, which has added rising stress to hospitals and medical personnel in hard-hit states such as Florida, Texas and California.

But this isn’t just about caseload, which many Trump acolytes like to dismiss as immaterial. The positivity rate is climbing, and so is the death rate. The average death toll from July 8-15 was 726, highest it had been in a month after bottoming out at 471 earlier in July. Bad trend. Very bad trend.

What could shut down a season? The NCAA delves into that as well, noting the increase in COVID-19 spread and saying that “it is possible that sports, especially high contact risk sports, may not be practiced safely in some areas. In conjunction with public health officials, schools should consider pausing or discontinuing athletics activities when local circumstances warrant such consideration.” Among the factors that could end a season: “Campuswide or local community test rates that are considered unsafe by local public health officials.”

For everyone screaming that positive tests among young athletes don’t matter, health officials beg to differ. Healthy young people do not live in a vacuum, even on a college campus. They come in contact with many others who can be more susceptible to major health issues, up to and including death.

The caution being preached by every major conference, and the NCAA, is not politics. It’s on advice of people who deal with this disease for a living.

Still, a perverse line of thought has percolated in some dim corners that people with a stake in the game are rooting for the virus and against college football. The NCAA is not rooting against football. The power conferences, having fed at the revenue trough for decades and now begging fans to wear masks, are not rooting against football. The sports media industry, which is staring at its own economic disaster, is not rooting against football.

All those entities very much want college football. They’re also listening to experts tell them why college football is a really risky endeavor right now.

Perhaps football in the fall was always an impossible dream, but it seemed much more real in late May and early June, with America sacrificing and caseloads dropping. Then the shallow reservoir of Trumpian forbearance ran out, and people went back to doing whatever they wanted to do, gorging on “freedom.”

And now we’ll see whether some semblance of college football can still be played. If not, send the receipts for a lost season to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Five takeaways from Washington Post’s Redskins story on alleged sexual harassment

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/16/redskins-story-report-takeaways/

As owner Daniel Snyder prepares to rename Washington’s NFL team amid extreme pressure and the franchise’s minority owners are actively seeking to sell their shares, several women have detailed repeated instances of sexual harassment that have lingered around the organization for some time.

In interviews with The Post, 15 former female employees described numerous incidents in which executives and scouts made unwelcome overtures or comments of a sexual nature and in some cases were encouraged to wear revealing clothing and flirt with clients to close sales calls.

“I am done with the NFL,” one of the women said, adding that the team “has killed any dream of a career in pro sports.”

1. The team environment tolerated frequent sexual harassment and verbal abuse of female employees.

Over the past several years many of the team’s current and former employees have been critical of the culture they experienced under Snyder and former team president Bruce Allen. In The Post story, the 15 former female employees detailed their experiences in a workplace where executives berated them and commented inappropriately about their appearances.

The women said they often felt helpless and believed complaints about the executives’ behavior were ignored. One woman, Emily Applegate, said she assumed Allen, who was not accused of inappropriate behavior, knew what was happening because his office was just 30 feet away from her and saw her “sobbing at my desk several times every week.”

Allen, who was fired at the end of last year, did not reply to interview requests.

2. Washington’s NFL team didn’t have the proper structure to handle harassment complaints.

The story notes that the team’s human resources staff consisted of one full-time staffer, who also performs administrative duties at the team headquarters. That means just one person is responsible for more than 220 full-time employees.

Women, interviewed by The Post said they often were told informally by veteran female staffers which male employees avoid and to stay away from places such as the open stairwell in the middle of the team’s facility, where men could look up their skirts.

In a statement, the team said it hired a new human resources manager in 2019, and this employee works with the team’s legal department on any issues involving employee conduct.

3. Snyder belittled executives, helping to create an uncomfortable workplace for everyone.

Snyder was not accused of harassment but was described as belittling to his senior employees. Women who worked for Dennis Greene, the former president of business operations, said Greene made them uncomfortable by encouraging them to wear low-cut blouses and tight skirts when meeting sales clients but also were conflicted in their feelings about him given the way they saw Snyder treat him.

For instance, a former employee said Snyder constantly teased Greene about being a cheerleader in college and once made him do cartwheels at the end of an executive staff meeting.

Both Snyder and Greene declined to comment for the story.

4. The team has hired an outside attorney to study the franchise’s culture.

In a statement on Thursday, Washington’s NFL team said it has hired D.C. attorney Beth Wilkinson and her law firm Wilkinson Walsh “to conduct a thorough independent review of this entire matter and help the team set new employee standards for the future.”

Wilkinson’s review is the second the franchise has undertaken in recent days. On July 3, the team announced it is doing a “thorough review” of its longtime name “Redskins.” Earlier this week, the team said that review has started and will result in its retiring the name ‘Redskins.’

5. Alex Santos, Richard Mann II and Larry Michael all left the team after complaints were raised.

Several women interviewed described incidents of inappropriate touching and comments from Santos, the former director of pro scouting. Mann, the former assistant director of pro scouting, was accused to sending flirtatious and sexual texts to two former female employees. Many women said Michael, the team’s longtime play-by-play announcer, made objectifying and off-color comments about female employees.

Santos and Mann were fired last Saturday this past week, and Michael abruptly announced his retirement Wednesday afternoon.

Santos, Mann and Michael each declined to comment.

Exclusive: Fifteen women who worked for Redskins allege sexual harassment by former scouts and members of owner Daniel Snyder’s inner circle https://t.co/MwMTOFupF9

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 16, 2020

==

The much-anticipated Washington Post report is out, and it says 15 female employees of the Washington NFL team allege they were sexually harassed https://t.co/oNAInYeDhf

— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) July 16, 2020

Expect about double that number by the time initial testing is done. Players maybe be healthy and young but not immune to what is out there in the community. Key to season is what happens after initial tests and quarantine. https://t.co/NsB8f54vCS

— David J. Chao – ProFootballDoc (@ProFootballDoc) July 16, 2020

Chris Evans sends Captain America shield to boy hurt defending his sister from dog https://t.co/kxfojScRc3

— Jim Fadler (@jimistlboy) July 16, 2020

Centuries of Racism Have Created a Mental Health Crisis Among Black Americans

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/centuries-racism-created-mental-health-192800198.html

“He wanted me to run, so he could shoot me in the back,” my father said through tears that refused to fall. It was last month, the day before Father’s Day. Instead of making plans to celebrate, my dad and I sat in grief and fear together, like so many Black parents and their children, over the senseless loss of more Black lives.

He was telling me the story of how, as a 16-year-old walking around his neighborhood in Savannah, Georgia, he had been picked up by the police. After being taken to a field and told to “run,” he instead proceeded to kneel on the ground with his hands up. That didn’t stop a police officer from beating him to the ground with his baton to “teach him a lesson,” but it did mean that my father lived through an experience that so many Black boys and men don’t.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve witnessed a national dialogue about racism against Black people in America unlike I’ve ever seen. That, coupled with hearing my Dad share his own experiences, has triggered many memories of violence I experienced at the hands of racist people and institutions in my own life. As the cofounder and co-CEO of a mental health company, Shine, I am reckoning with how those experiences have shaped my relationship with my own mental wellbeing.

I keep reliving my first vivid experience of racism: I was in my front yard when a tall kid from my elementary school, a boy four years older, used my face as a punching bag and repeatedly spat the N-word at me. I was in the first grade. I distinctly remember the sweat that dripping off of his face while he beat me. I cycled through three different elementary schools in Warren, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, because white children and teachers couldn’t keep their hands off me. One teacher had a bad habit of grabbing me aggressively and verbally degrading me in front of other kids. When my mom reported her to the school’s principal, the principal proceeded to tell us that I “should probably find another school,” because she didn’t think I “belonged there, anyway.”

By the time I reached middle school, the racism I experienced went from episodes of physical assault to everyday vicarious racism. My middle school boyfriend’s best friend constantly showed him videos of Black porn, asking him how it was possible to find me attractive. I spent a suspicious amount of time in the nurse’s office, so I could avoid the racist boys in my gym class every Thursday. Years later, a white college classmate penned a Wikipedia-sourced essay on “ebonics” and what she described as the “irony of how Black people fought for education, and now they don’t even use it,” which our professor commented was a “great thesis.”

When I entered the workforce, the racism I experienced became more veiled. Remarks like “I asked for authentic, not ghetto” or “I felt like you were too aggressive in that meeting” or “Why do all the Black girls hang out together? I hope this isn’t an us against them thing” ring through my head when I think back on my experience in corporate America.

My experience, with all the privileges I hold as a light-skinned, able-bodied, cis-gendered, heterosexual woman, are a fraction of what many Black children and adults in America go through every single day—and that is glaringly reflected in the state of our collective mental health. For hundreds of years, this compounding systemic racism and generational trauma has wreaked havoc on Black wellbeing.

Not only are Black Americans 20 percent more likely to have serious psychological distress compared to our white counterparts, but research shows that we are also more likely to have feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, depressive occurrences in Black people are more disabling, persistent, and resistant to treatment than those experienced by white people. Additionally, Black people are more likely to be victims of violent crimes, and therefore more likely to experience PTSD. Black women, specifically, are far more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other population. Let that sink in.

Black people even have our own mental health disorders. Research shows that chronic experiences of racism and microaggressions can result in “racial battle fatigue,” which includes anxiety and worry, hyper-vigilance, headaches, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and other physical and psychological symptoms. This is in addition to the physiological impacts of sharing the same cells as our ancestors who were beaten, tortured, raped, and enslaved for hundreds of years.

When it comes to treatment for mental illness, Black people are at a serious disadvantage. The data shows that racial minorities who demonstrate behavioral struggles as children are more likely to be referred to the juvenile system, rather than receive the care they need. Black people aren’t supported in our mental health struggles at a young age, and when we do seek help, it’s difficult to find providers that understand us, trust us, or relate to our experience; just as with physical health care within the Black community, we see provider bias, lack of cultural competence, and socioeconomic barriers to mental health care. Lack of professional representation is part of the issue—in 2018, only 4 percent of American Psychology Association members were Black. Add all this together, and you might understand why only 30 percent of Black people with mental illness receive treatment each year, compared to the U.S. average of 43 percent.

I started Shine because I was tired of this lack of representation and inclusion in “wellness.” As I navigated the landmines of racism throughout my childhood and in corporate America, the media seemed to be telling me that all I had to do was be a little skinnier, whiter, and richer to feel better—that my mental health could be improved with a $5,000 silent retreat or by watching videos of Tony Robbins yell at his followers.

That didn’t work for me. Or my friends or family members. Or my co-founder, Naomi Hirabayashi, who is Asian. We were tired of hearing from corporations that pretended that mental and emotional health was the great equalizer because our experiences just weren’t the same.

At Shine, representation and inclusion are at the heart of what we do—more than 80 percent of our team are people of color, and of the nearly 1,000 meditations in our app, 90 percent are created and voiced by Black women. We don’t shy away from specificity—our content tackles issues specific to Black mental health, LGBTQ+ mental health, women’s mental health, the intersection of all of those identities, and more. The impact shows in our community, which is twice as representative of Black women as the American population.

If we, as a society, care about Black mental health, we will take a long overdue look at both the factors that contribute to the worsening mental health within the Black community, and work to make our mental health industry more informed by those factors. I am one of the roughly three dozen Black women in America who has raised at least one million dollars in venture capital; while it’s crucial that Black founders like myself get the support, amplification, and funding needed to do our work, we are just one piece of the puzzle. Without wide-scale private and public funding of mental healthcare initiatives for Black Americans, more support for Black practitioners seeking to enter the field of mental health, and much deeper and more representative research on the why behind the disparities we see, there is no question: We will still be here in 100 years.

I am still coming to terms with the impact that racism has had on my own mental health. My daily anxiety, the grief I hold in my body every day—I know that these aren’t just the result of a “busy” “overconnected” culture. No, my mental health struggles are directly tied my father’s experience with the police that day. And to the experience of my ancestors. To my childhood bullies. To my negligent bosses. To my daily experience being a Black woman in America.

If we’ve seen anything from these past weeks, it’s that we can do more and we can do better and we can do it right now. Being Black in America is tantamount to death by a thousand cuts. If you believe that Black Lives Matter, I challenge you to also believe and fight for Black mental health.

This is here because Goff comes up.

…

Dak didn’t get his big deal. Told ya. And here’s why. pic.twitter.com/jNofz4XqJP

— Colin Cowherd (@ColinCowherd) July 16, 2020

.@AaronDonald97 is just the sixth player in @EAMaddenNFL history to earn a 9️⃣9️⃣ rating in four different years.#Madden21 pic.twitter.com/3ec6eVJVH9

— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) July 15, 2020

Top Pass Rushers in Madden 21

Aaron Donald – 99
JJ Watt – 98
Khalil Mack – 97
Von Miller – 97
Fletcher Cox – 96
Cameron Jordan – 96
Chandler Jones – 95
Calais Campbell – 95
Myles Garrett – 93
Chris Jones – 92

— NFL Stats (@NFL_Stats) July 15, 2020