The Sooners are squaring off against more than one opponent every week this Oklahoma football season.
You’re not only game planning to take on the next football team on the schedule but also doing your best not to be sidetracked — and, at worst, sidelined — by a hidden opponent that it indiscriminate and unrelenting in the personal and collective health risk it poses.
After a couple of months of training, preparation and extensive precautionary measures to avoid exposure to the debilitating and potential deadly coronavirus, the pervasive virus still almost got the upper hand last week and threatened to force cancellation of Saturday’s game against Missouri State.
An unspecified number of Sooner players, including several starters, tested positive last week for COVID-19 and immediately were isolated from the rest of the team.
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Head coach Lincoln Riley indicated in the team’s weekly press briefing with reporters this week that the positive COVID cases were one thing, but the bigger problem impacting the team is the number of players who become unavailable for a period of time because of contact tracing even it they never tested positive with the virus.
Riley told reporters that a “high majority” of the Sooner players who were forced to miss last weekend’s season-opening game was because of contact tracing protocols and not because of a positive COVID test. Most of these players had roommates who tested positive.
The Big 12 has implemented a new rapid COVID-19 antigen test that the teams will be using the day before games. Riley said the results of the tests administered last Friday were known within two hours.
Although the results may be known in a much shorter time frame, the Sooner head coach said, it doesn’t change the outcome of contact tracing. The guidelines that are presently in place for contact tracing say that persons who have high-risk contact with a person who tests positive for COVID-19 are subject to a 14-day quarantine.
“We have seriously reduced our number of what you would call contact traces that we could have been avoided — doing something dumb (like) going to a restaurant with somebody, getting in a car with somebody” Riley said.
“We’ve really made big improvements there,” he said. “But the one thing that’s really difficult to get around unless you just sit there at home and wear a mask all day, which is difficult for everybody to do, is the roommate situation.”
The simple solution is to wear a mask whenever you around another person. That’s pretty much become common knowledge, and many of the Sooner players are following that direction, according to Riley. But obviously not all.
It comes down to wearing a mask, Riley said. “It’s hard, but if you want to play, you want to be around it, it’s just what you’ve got to do.”