Maybe Brian Kelly didn’t mean to foreshadow, but his postgame speech after Notre Dame defeated South Florida did so anyway.
The Irish had defeated the Bulls 52-0 Sept. 19, with seven players from the depth chart absent with no prior reported injuries. In the era of COVID-19, it’s not hard to assume what happened. They were not missed in that rout. To Kelly, that game was the one mulligan opportunity on the schedule.
“Do not let your guard down,” Kelly told his team in a speech posted by NBC. “We’re in all ACC games now. We’re not going to get a game like this where if we lose starters, we’re going to get through it.”
He’s technically right. A team can’t get through a game it doesn’t even reach.
Notre Dame postponed its Sept. 26 game at Wake Forest after a round of tests administered Sept. 21 revealed seven new positives and brought the number of players in COVID-19 protocols to 23. Tests administered from Sept. 22-27 yielded 18 positives and a total of 39 players in either isolation or quarantine. Had the Irish tried to play as scheduled or make up the game Oct. 3, they would have done so without approximately a third of their roster.
Ultimately, the decision to postpone came down to reduced player availability and lack of control over the spread. The ACC’s only minimum roster requirement for games this year is seven available scholarship linemen. Individual schools can determine what constitutes an outbreak or untenable player absences. Notre Dame decided it had both.
“When that group of players and their close contacts went into insolation and quarantine, that obviously was a pretty significant chunk,” said Dr. Mark Fox, the St. Joseph County (Ind.) deputy public health officer who has consulted the team. “I don’t think there was a whole lot of debate, and it was both in terms of the number of players impacted and the need to get a handle on to what extent the rest of the team was impacted.”
It’s still not clear what caused the outbreak, which began to fester the week leading up to the USF game and broke loose the week after. The other two-thirds of the roster has resumed conditioning activities, while another round of tests were given Monday. Fox, though, has zeroed in on a couple theories and areas in Notre Dame’s game week plan to amend. He has studied every minute of players’ days and the changes in their routines from this summer.
“De-densifying the locker room and team meals are the two big areas we’ve focused on,” Fox said.
The locker room usage in question is before and after practice. Kelly indicated during training camp Notre Dame had already reduced its capacity to 50 percent, but doing so even further would reduce contact and promote more physical distancing.
“We haven’t identified that as a source, but it’s an area of concern,” Fox said.
Meals at the hotel check a few high-risk categories. They’re indoors. They’re unmasked. Players are gathered at tables and are presumably talking with each other. Notre Dame has Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast at the hotel before games.
“If a couple [players] have been exposed, don’t know they're infected and are eating together, that’s one way it could have been introduced,” Fox said. “We’re trying to chase that down.”
At this point, those are hypotheses more than confirmed spreader events. Notre Dame may adjust them, but won’t assume those alterations will solve the problem for good. In-game spread and campus spread have been explored, but are also seen as low-probability spreading agents.
A game brings exposure to people from out of region, but both Duke and USF had no positives in their final round of testing before coming to Notre Dame. USF had no positives in tests administered the Monday after the game. The seven Notre Dame players who tested positive the Monday after the USF game (and were available to play in it) tested negative the Friday before it.
“They were tested with very reliable, sensitive and specific tests Friday afternoon,” Fox said. “That test was negative, which at least suggests to me it’s unlikely they had a sufficient viral load to represent a substantial risk of contagion at game time. Their exposure was before the game, but they were likely not contagious at the time of the game. Their viral load increased over the weekend and they tested positive Monday.”
Notre Dame’s contact tracers and Fox have not found an obvious spreading event on campus that could have been the source of the game-week exposure. Cases on campus have diminished after a late August surge. The university’s dashboard shows 41 cases, which includes the football team’s 25. Football has 18 of the school’s 28 positive tests since Sept. 22.
“Was there some setting where they were more relaxed than would have otherwise been the case?” Fox said. “Nothing we’ve identified yet. My sense from the contact tracers is people have been pretty forthcoming. If there were some big party where everyone was unmasked, we would have heard about it.”
In all this discussion about outbreaks, holes in protocols and small tweaks, there’s one question that naturally arises. Is there a need for more frequent testing? The Big Ten’s and Pac-12’s recent plans to return cited daily testing as a primary factor in creating comfort that football could be safely played.
The ACC requires three PCR nasal swab tests per week, and Notre Dame has gone beyond that. It tests certain segments of its roster — mainly linemen — daily and has daily tests available to players who need them.
“I talked with Jack Swarbrick and [team physician] Matt [Leiszler] about it,” Fox said. “They were noncommittal about it. I personally feel the testing sequence that had been laid out before really should be adequate because it detects a very low level of virus…Being able to detect a lower level of virus, even though you do it less frequently, ought to be adequate.”
Notre Dame is 11 days out from its next scheduled game, Oct. 10 at Florida State. Individual starting dates for players in 14-day quarantine and 10-day isolation aren’t known, but judging off general timing, it’s possible a majority of those 39 players currently out could be back by that date.
Kelly said missing multiple practices in a game week would make playing a game that weekend untenable. Tuesday, Oct. 6 seems like the last possible day Notre Dame could return to practice and play Florida State as scheduled. The Irish would assuredly have absences, either from players still stuck in COVID-19 protocols or those who recently emerged but could not practice enough.
For all the possible tweaking of protocols Notre Dame can do, Kelly made sure in that postgame speech his players understood they have a way to contribute to sustaining the season, and right now, saving it from getting any worse: wear a mask. He reminded a player named “Mike” to pull up his mask before stressing the importance of it.
The consequences of further COVID-19 troubles remain significant, both health-related and football-related. The latter has their attention.
“We’re too damn good,” Kelly said. “We can win a national championship if we just show the discipline to just wear a mask. I know nobody enjoys wearing a mask. But guess what? We have a special group of guys here. Why not take this to where we want it to go?”
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