How Notre Dame Adjusted To Combat Outbreak, And Its Next Steps To Game Day
A week that began with the jarring announcement of 25 positive tests in the prior seven days ended with a Brian Kelly bar none declaration.
“We’re going to be able to prepare the football team to play Florida State,” Kelly said Thursday, in his first media appearance since Notre Dame paused football activities and postponed its Sept. 26 game at Wake Forest.
Kelly’s 14 words indicate there’s a task still ahead, and indeed, Notre Dame has to get its roster closer to full strength and game-ready after nine in-season days without padded practices. At the same time, Notre Dame needed to come a long way just to make them sound realistic.
An outbreak needed containing. Every minute of players’ days was put under a microscope. Seemingly mundane decisions and actions were revealed to be not so mundane, namely the already distant pregame meal setup.
Notre Dame determined its pregame meal before the Sept. 19 game against South Florida was a super-spreader of the COVID-19 outbreak that sidelined 39 players due to a positive test or contact tracing. The extent of its adjustments, though, stretch well beyond a tighter approach to its Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast, which will now be held in a separate convention center with even more distancing.
“We looked at everything, said Rob Hunt, Notre Dame’s director of athletic training rehabilitative services. “Certainly, our meal may have been a part of that. But there were some other opportunities for us to look at what we’re doing and determined there were some areas where we were loose in maintaining the strict discipline approach.”
With one more open date on the schedule – on a day where everyone else in the ACC has games, no less – Notre Dame has little margin for another slip-up and canceled game. An asymptomatic case or two cannot morph into something worse if the Irish want to play the rest of their games.
“Everyone is aware of that and we know we have no wiggle room for the kind of setback we had,” Kelly said.
In the days since Sept. 22, when seven new cases from the day before forced the postponement, Notre Dame spent its time diving deep into the weeds of the outbreak. COVID-19’s unrelenting presence makes new tactics and adjustments feel more like a tourniquet than permanent stitches, but they were enough to spark the confidence Kelly displayed.
“We have one foot on the brake still,” Hunt said. “But all of us feel a lot better about where we’re at now compared to 10 days ago.”
Policy Tweaks
Among Kelly’s preseason entreaties was to embrace the difficulty of the sacrifices necessary to play a season. Foregoing parts of college life for months is hard. So too is remaining mentally sharp and avoiding the trap of thinking a few weeks of clean tests or playing a game means the virus is conquered. The general looseness and tad too strong sense of accomplishment Hunt described falls under the latter category.
“A negative test doesn’t mean you’re free and clear from the virus at that point,” Hunt said. “It just might mean you had a viral load low enough that you didn’t test positive. We’re going to tighten those pieces up and have strict adherence to the policies and procedures we had prior to this outbreak.”
First on the list of increased measures is a “zero tolerance” policy on failing to wear masks at all times, particularly in the locker room. The team will also spread out further on the sideline during games. To Hunt, both of those areas left room for improvement in obedience and enforcement.
“These are speculative, but as we looked at the clusters we had, position groups they were, how we contact traced the spread, there are areas we can get better,” Hunt said.
Even before the outbreak took off, Kelly was harping on masks’ importance. During his USF postgame speech, posted to NBCSports.com, he told a player to pull up his mask and lectured the team that “I can’t be the guy or a coach can’t be the guy reminding you every time to put your mask on.”
At the suggestion of St. Joseph County deputy public health officer Dr. Mark Fox, Notre Dame is also further reducing capacity in its locker room. What was a staggered, scheduled approach to pre- and post-practice locker room usage now includes de-densifying measures, Hunt said. The specific tactics were not disclosed.
“Those are the areas we’ve identified to help ourselves prevent this from happening again, so our guys continue to move forward through the season,” Hunt said. “They have done a great job through this and worked hard over the last week to get this under control.”
As of now, Notre Dame is making only minor tweaks to its testing plan. The team is tested three time per week, in accordance with ACC rules, and tests players who engage in the most contact (linemen) every day. The primary change is the availability of rapid antigen tests on the sideline during games.
“Daily testing might be a piece we end up at, but I know that’s beyond where I’m at,” Hunt said. “I know Dr. Fox was very comfortable with our (testing). We have a little bit of a blend of everything. On the backside of this cluster outbreak, I feel good about where we’re at with our testing.”
Ramping Back Up
As of Thursday, 29 players were caught in COVID-19 protocols. By Saturday, the number will drop to 15. The timing of some others’ entry into isolation or quarantine suggests single digits for the Florida State game should be attainable. Notre Dame had no positives in Monday and Wednesday’s testing, with the next round scheduled for Friday.
The ACC requires a 14-day quarantine for players identified through contact tracing, allowing for modified workouts and class attendance if a quarantined player tests negative on the fourth and seventh day.
“Those guys are going to be in great shape,” Kelly said. “When they get to the 14th day, they can hit the field running. It’s just about technique, execution and things like that.”
Anyone who tests positive must isolate for 10 days, but the process for returning to practice in full is closer to 14 days. Players are given an EKG and echocardiogram on their first day post-isolation. Those tests go to Dr. Richard Kovacs, an Indianapolis-based cardiologist with IU Health. If they’re cleared, a three-day leadup to full practice participation can begin.
“Day 11, they’ll go through conditioning, 50 percent of their practice on 12, about 75 percent of their practice on 13,” Kelly said.
Meanwhile, for the first time in 30 years as a head coach, Kelly has to resuscitate a team from a sudden, extended layoff. This isn’t a matter of incorporating a previously injured player into a game plan after he was cleared. The entire team went a week without doing any activity and nine days without contact. Developing rhythms and individual momentum were halted.
Notre Dame may not be at its smoothest when it plays on Oct. 10, and beating 0-2 Florida State likely won’t require it. Kelly’s goal, though, is for Notre Dame’s play to convey its season was merely paused like it is every year before bowl season, with no sides of COVID-19 sideswiping it two weeks earlier.
“There will have to be some bowl game-type preparation, if you will,” Kelly said. “But two weeks is not two months. There will be some challenges. But once the game gets going, this group has played a lot of football and I’m confident we’ll be able to get up to snuff pretty quickly.”
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