After the NFL and NFL Players Association realized that it had a rash of asymptomatic players who were testing positive and not available to play, the league now has a rash of symptomatic players missing Week 16 games.
Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, nevertheless tells Ian Rapoport of NFL Media that Sills is happy with the extent to which players are volunteering that they have symptoms.
“I am pleased to see the system working the way we set it up,” Sills told Rapoport. “We do believe in community responsibility to your team and your teammates. I am personally pleased to see people come forward and say, ‘Hey, I don’t feel well’, and recognize that they must make sure they are not endangering anyone else. It’s a great lesson, and I think a model for how we should be in the outside world, in schools, in business. The reality is, those in the NFL who have symptoms should get checked and tested and treated as such so they don’t expose others. This is our path forward.”
He’s right, but for every player who raises a hand, how many others are keeping their lips zipper? And how does any of this mesh with the contention from the days preceding Week 16 that the vast majority of the players who tested positive were asymptomatic?
That’s where the logic crumbles. Not long ago, the concern was that the protocols were keeping too many asymptomatic players from playing. Now, the symptomatic players are clogging the COVID-19 reserve lists.
If that many players are testing positive due to symptoms, how many others have it but aren’t symptomatic? Given the notion that, especially with the Omicron variant, most players will be fine, if the bulk of the players who end up on the list have symptoms, many others have it but don’t have symptoms.
So, basically, it’s likely racing through the facilities. And it quite possibly will be worse this week, as exposures to family and friends during holiday celebrations result in more positives. This week, none of the games ever was in grave danger of being postponed or canceled, although some teams were getting close to the minimum number of permissible players, a number that the league officially protects as zealously as the actual PSI numbers collected during the first season post-#Deflategate.
The silver lining continues to be that, as players get COVID now, they become exempt from missing any more time with it through the balance of the postseason. In the interim, however, the quality of the games and the integrity of the outcomes will be compromised as more and more players end up not being available for some of the most impactful games of the regular season.