OT- Steelers vs Titans game off this week
October 1st, 2020 at 9:41 AM ^
Is anyone surprised by this? I presume the NFL has a plan in place to deal with this eventuality.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:47 AM ^
I believe the plan was to start the season and then cross the fingers.
October 1st, 2020 at 9:47 AM ^
Wonder if they'll go so far as to shuffle bye weeks for a few teams to create a common bye week to play this game.
October 1st, 2020 at 9:50 AM ^
This is what happens without a bubble atmosphere.
October 1st, 2020 at 9:52 AM ^
It's a whole lot easier to create a bubble with 30 teams of 15 players, as opposed to 32 teams of 60 players.
Or 130 teams of 125 players.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:21 AM ^
Don't think we should be too concerned with how easy something is for a multi billion dollar government sanctioned monopoly. If they wanted to do it, they could. They simply can't be bothered.
October 1st, 2020 at 3:35 PM ^
Sure, if they wanted to they could but the difficulty and expense weighs into the (purely economic) decision of whether to do it or not. Sure they could have done it, but they made the calculated guess that it wouldn't be worth it. One postponed game in a quarter of the season means they might have made the right choice. TBD on whether things get worse.
October 1st, 2020 at 11:34 AM ^
Some effort would be nice though. Seems like all the Covid regulations for fans are up to the discretion of the teams. Mask wearing among staff seems inconsistent at best.
October 1st, 2020 at 3:37 PM ^
They're imposing pretty huge fines on staff (and teams) that don't comply with mask wearing. They imposed rules and they're punishing rule breakers so there's not more they can do about mask wearing.
October 1st, 2020 at 9:51 AM ^
This is what I'm expecting. They probably don't want to mess with the playoff/Super Bowl schedule too much.
October 1st, 2020 at 9:55 AM ^
The thing I read about this today was regarding the incubation period of the virus and how rapid point of contact testing may not catch people who have it already but aren't yet contagious. I am still a little confused by this - both in how the virus works and how rampant testing wouldn't still allow you to isolate players daily without risking wide spread transmission.
The article said that they had one player test positive Saturday so they held him out, but now they have 8-10 people infected.
Makes me wonder about the B10's system and how vulnerable it still might be since I thought the NFL was using something similar.
October 1st, 2020 at 12:32 PM ^
A couple interesting points come from this. One is that the NFL, like the Big Ten, uses daily testing, but the NFL uses the more accurate PCR test. The only day the NFL doesn't test is game day.
At the very least, this calls into question the Big Ten's theory that daily testing will be sufficient to prevent an in team outbreak. The validity of the Big Ten's theory now relies on either the outbreak resulting from the NFL's single day of non testing or that the use of faster but less accurate testing would have prevented the outbreak. If I were to place a bet, I would think neither factor would save a Big Ten team from an outbreak.
It is also interesting that the NFL is so concerned about a further outbreak that they shut down all facilities from just a few positive tests. It certainly calls into question the Big Ten plan of letting practice continue and just isolating whoever has a positive test.
I will say, I think the NFL and Big Ten plans both probably prevent the team wide outbreaks seen at the likes of LSU, even if those plans aren't perfect.
October 1st, 2020 at 2:22 PM ^
I'm guessing you're talking about this.
The article points out that the incubation period of the virus may result in a negative test while nevertheless putting others at risk. The B1G's protocol of daily antigen testing proclaimed that the test would show up positive prior to that individual becoming infectious, but I'm highly skeptical based on the published literature I've seen thus far. My basic point is that the data on transmissivity from an infected but asymptomatic individual is still not nailed down.
Further, I would expect any PCR-based test to have greater sensitivity than any antigen test (I'm open to having my mind changed, but haven't seen that yet from Abbott or Quidel's public data for their rapid test kits). So if the NFL does indeed have a "flaw" per the suggestion in the article, an even bigger potential flaw would be presumed to exist in the B1G testing. To my mind, there's still too much uncertainty to reach that conclusion.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:19 AM ^
Felt inevitable; I assume they'll move some schedules around a bit to make it work. But we're not even at week 4 and they've already had to do this; there's a good chance there will be other outbreaks and games will need to be shuffled, and they might not have the same flexibility then. I wonder if after a certain length of season they just skip the game.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:45 AM ^
They will almost certainly move Tenn/Pitt to week 7 (the Titans original bye week), and Pitt/Balt from week 7 to week 8 (the Steelers and Ravens original bye week).
The NFL has moved games and bye weeks around between weeks in years like 1992 and 2008 due to Hurricanes (moved games off an entire week, not just re-scheduled to within the week), so this isn't completely unprecedented. In 2008, a Lions/Texans game got moved a week because of changes necessitated by Hurricane Ike postponing Ravens/Texans in week 2.
Bye weeks allow some flexibility. The bigger concern, of course, is what happens when you have no flexibility due to no bye weeks.
October 1st, 2020 at 12:00 PM ^
Yeah, I agree. They have more flexibility now, but in 4-5 weeks you won't necessarily have the same fluidity built into the schedule. I don't think they want to push back the playoffs if they don't have to.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:26 AM ^
More importantly, how will this affect fantasy football?!
October 1st, 2020 at 10:42 AM ^
Ok, so they have some flexibility to rescheduled, looks like Monday or Tues. Did the B1G release their plan to reschedule games if (rather when) necessary bc of the covid19 flare-up's?
October 1st, 2020 at 11:04 AM ^
It looked like Monday or Tuesday, as of yesterday. Today they announced no game this week.
October 1st, 2020 at 10:43 AM ^
At this point in the season this is easy to deal with as all teams have yet to have bye weeks. If it happens later in the season its going to get more difficult to manage.
October 1st, 2020 at 11:19 AM ^
Cases are on the upswing again in the US. Let's see if even more games get canceled.
October 1st, 2020 at 11:21 AM ^
For the record, positivity rate is down over the last 7 days in the US. It's a slight decrease, but it IS a decrease.
Cases may be up, but it is fair to point that testing is up a slight bit more.
October 1st, 2020 at 12:06 PM ^
It's hanging around 5%, which is that sweet spot with a number of re-opening plans across the country. We'll see if this is a sustained shift downward or if it's a blip.
October 1st, 2020 at 12:37 PM ^
From Reuters article this morning:
“The United States reported 1.18 million new cases in September compared with 1.41 million in August.”
doesn’t seem like up month over month but you may be using w/w data? Anyway, a brief positive in what I expect will be a winter/return to school surge.
be safe everyone
October 1st, 2020 at 12:45 PM ^
This will be interesting as to how they'll shuffle this as NFL season are always a very tight scheduling endeavor
October 1st, 2020 at 3:43 PM ^
It will probably all work out in the end, like it ultimately did for MLB. But in both cases, it was arrogance of both leagues to assume they could get by without having to postpone games, and then scrambling to make accommodations when they inevitably had to postpone.
This would have been a good season to have an extra bye week, or a completely empty week at the end of the season, in order to make up any missed games. But no, they thought they could walk the tightrope and everything would work out perfectly. So far it's just a slip, and they can live with just pushing the Steelers/Ravens game back a week to carry on. But the next one won't be so easy, so you're going to have to cancel games because they cannot be made up.
October 1st, 2020 at 7:01 PM ^
I had thought there was a built-in window for the postseason this time around, although I could have misheard. That is to say, an allowance for a certain number of games to be moved due to virus concerns, allowing the postseason to occur later than it normally might.