Analysis: Season Finally Feels Near — The Games, Oddities And Tripwire
Notre Dame knows its kickoff times. It announced its NBC broadcast team and attendance policies. ACC preseason all-conference and standings ballots are due Tuesday evening.
At long last, tangible signs of the season are here. The idea of one feels less like a figment of imagination and is met with less skepticism surrounding its ability to get off the ground. Notre Dame even held a scrimmage in the stadium last weekend to remind the players, yes, this is finally on the doorstep. Barring something drastic, the season will start.
In 11 days, Notre Dame will host Duke at 2:30 p.m. on NBC. That alone reads like all’s well, nothing’s wrong. But the normalcy ends there. Head coach Brian Kelly’s Tuesday Zoom press conference was still filled with reminders of oddities and the possible tripwire this season will bring, as well as the obstacles that could derail a game week, even as he confirmed the depth chart is all but settled and anointed Kyren Williams the top running back.
Notre Dame Stadium will hold no more than 15,525 fans, comprised only of students, faculty, staff and player families. It’s not yet known if players will even be allowed to see their families the night before a game, as is typically allowed. Creating a buzz in the stadium with 10,000 spaced-out students is surely a never-before-attempted task. On Kelly’s list of concerns or gripes, though, gameday atmosphere falls at the bottom.
“It’s still going to provide a home-field advantage,” Kelly said. “You still have to get on a plane, still have to come to South Bend, still have to come to our stadium.
“I’m pretty confident we’re going to be able to put together an exciting atmosphere. It’s still going to come down to our players and execution. In a large degree, they’re going to create that.”
Kelly seems to have put more thought into the minimum number of practices and minimum number of players needed to play. In Kelly’s view, missing two practices due to a team-wide outbreak or school decision to pause them would be a severe detriment. Three might be a non-starter for hopes of playing that week.
The timing of them will matter as well. Losing practices early in the week means less time for hitting, which is typically not done or scaled back in the couple days before a game. Kelly sees the loss of contact practices as worse than canceling a late-week walkthrough or non-padded day.
“If you’re out of business Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, you’re in trouble for having a team that can practice and be prepared,” Kelly said. “That would require you to have not assembled your group in a manner that would mean you’ve knocked out everybody. We’ve been in a number of situations where we don’t believe there is going to be heavy transmission on the field.
“So that’s assuming a lot of things go wrong. If they do, my answer is if you lose two or three days early in the week, you’re hard-pressed to get your team ready.”
Even as the season nears, some teams have not been able to avoid the COVID-19 stumbles that will be a lurking specter all year. ACC member N.C. State already pushed back its football season opener from Sept. 12 to Sept. 26 after it paused workouts for all teams. Three clusters of COVID-19 were found on campus, including one that linked 27 cases to the athletic department. The football team resumed practice Monday, its first activity since Aug. 22.
Notre Dame’s relative lack of trouble so far, though, has allowed its recent headlines to remain about football.
The campus outbreak last month that forced the suspension of in-person classes for two weeks had only a small effect on the football team. The team lost three days of practice and had five players test positive — certainly not negligible, but not the disaster situation that swept the rest of campus. Its most recent test results yielded two positives. All told, 11 players have tested positive since mid-June, with a team positivity rate of less than 1 percent.
The discipline to largely ward off last month’s perils and present threat wasn’t a surprise to Kelly. It was already there since June. But there were lessons to come from the last couple weeks.
“When the students came to campus, it heightened their awareness because they became more vulnerable to being in a COVID situation or being a close contact,” Kelly said.
Close contacts are as big a detriment to games as positive tests. The ACC’s medical protocols state anyone who is a close contact of an infected person (within 6 feet for at least 15 minutes) must quarantine for 14 days. Anyone who tests positive must isolate for 10. Notre Dame has had nine positive tests since August, and they have led to 15 other players quarantining due to contact tracing.
It could be worse. LSU, for instance, recently practiced without all but four offensive linemen due to COVID-19 exposure. Yet any quarantine situation can create problems when it happens during the season. Notre Dame held its first fall camp practice (and presumably others that followed) without nine players, seven of whom were out because of contact tracing. The latest test results revealed only two were quarantined for that reason.
“I think they became much more aware of the things that can put them out of practice,” Kelly said. “We all know you can get the virus. But being a close contact, not being sick and being out in some instances longer than someone who could have the virus is a wake-up call in terms of who you’re around and how you handle yourself.”
Due in part to that understanding, a season is allowed to finally feel like a reality.
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