There are lots of areas of an NFL facility where a player might expect his personal space to be intruded on. Normally, the hot tub isn’t one of them. And yet, there Joel Bitonio and Austin Hooper were 10 days ago, when a Browns trainer came in to, more or less, break up their pool party.
“The guy just came in, he was like, ‘Hey Hoop, you tested positive. You gotta get out,’” Bitonio said on his way home Wednesday. “And he said, ‘What? What do you mean’ And I’m standing five feet away from him and I’m like, ‘Uh, what’s happening here?’”
The Browns’ COVID-19 outbreak of 2021 was happening, and the weird moments were just starting for a team that would, over the course of just a few days, prepare for a game on a short week down more than 20 players; face the threat of having that game canceled and players’ pay for it eliminated; and then, finally, endure a reschedule that moved the contest to a Tuesday, and created an even shorter week to be capped with a Christmas Day game.
If your head’s spinning, you probably weren’t paying much attention to how things have gone in the NFL of late. The league’s return to (relative) normalcy in 2021 has, officially now, been blown up with the Omicron variant wreaking on the NFL schedule. The Browns were one of three teams to experience outbreaks last week, which led to six teams having to go through a very 2020 circumstance.
Those six got through it and, for now, the three teams hit hard with COVID-19 have stemmed the tide. But if the problem is waning in Washington, Cleveland and Los Angeles, it has exploded elsewhere, with the Texans, Jets, Ravens and Saints all counting more than 10 players on their COVID-19 reserve lists.
The NFL has three weeks left in its regular season, then five weeks of playoffs after that. Maybe this is a short-term blip, and Omicron rips through the NFL fast (that’s actually what seems to be happening in South Africa, where the variant first popped up), and things are O.K. by the time we get for January. But hoping for the best isn’t a plan. And all this has left everyone—the league, union, teams and players—looking for a good one. The past week necessitated that.
