‘Home market bubbles’ could be the path forward for an uninterrupted NFL season

The issue, of course, is that players and others leave that virtual bubble to go home each day. The potential exposure to the virus faced by NFL personnel outside the team environment has some health experts and other observers worried that the pro football season could be marred by the same sorts of outbreaks that have plagued Major League Baseball this summer.

So some NFL teams, including the New Orleans Saints, are taking it a step further by providing players, coaches and staffers with the option of staying in a hotel while away from the facility, reducing the risks of infection through interaction with the outside world. That’s not a mandatory element of the NFL’s protocols, but it is a voluntary step that could enhance the league’s chances of staging an uninterrupted season.

“I think our clubs have had a lot of very creative ideas and we’ve seen a lot of different innovations from how they practice to how they conduct meetings to the overall conduct of their day,” Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, said in a conference call with reporters last week. “And I think we’ll continue to see that, and I think those are all positive developments. That tells me that our players, our coaches, our staff, all the organizations, they’re thinking creatively about how they can mitigate risk for everyone that’s involved. And so we certainly encourage that thinking.”

The Saints are using four floors of the Loews New Orleans Hotel. The team estimates that about 150 of 180 players, coaches and staffers are staying there during training camp. No other guests are staying at the hotel, a team spokesman said.

The spokesman said he was not aware of any other NFL teams inquiring about the details of the setup or how it’s working. But Tampa Bay Buccaneers Coach Bruce Arians told reporters last week that his team has some players “sequestered” in a hotel.

“We can’t force the guys to go,” Arians said, “so it’s up to them. … We’ll obviously stay there the night before home games, like we always have. We talked about having a commitment to each other. It only takes one to sink the ship.”

He added that “it’s going to take a hell of a commitment from everybody.”

The NFL Players Association supports the arrangements, according to a person familiar with the union’s views.

Zachary Binney, an epidemiologist at Oxford College of Emory University, said such “home market bubbles,” with team personnel isolated from their communities in hotels, might be the NFL’s best chance to avoid MLB-like outbreaks within teams. The NFL, like baseball, is attempting to have a season with teams based in their home cities and playing in their home stadiums.

“They’re trying to do essentially what MLB has done,” Binney said. “And unless you believe that your people are going to be that much more responsible or your protocols are that much better, I’m afraid you’re going to see the same scenario.”

The NFL opted against a single-site bubble setup, as the NBA is doing near Orlando. It does not have teams gathered at a small number of hub cities, as the NHL is doing in two Canadian venues. Such measures were not considered feasible by the NFL given the length of the season, the number of players and team personnel involved, and the amount of space required.

Sills has said repeatedly that the NFL, in its deliberations with the NFLPA, must be flexible and is not ruling out any scenarios. But he also said last week that, no matter the setup, the level of compliance by participants with safety measures will determine the league’s success.

“A bubble alone doesn’t keep us safe if everyone is not complying with all the other elements of risk mitigation,” Sills said. “And so, again, it’s about wearing masks and face coverings. It’s about keeping physical distance. It’s about hand hygiene. It’s about symptom reporting, all of those things, everything we talked about. No matter what the location is, everyone inside that location has to be onboard and has to faithfully adhere to those protocols because whenever we let our guard down, that’s when we become vulnerable. And I think that’s something that you’ve seen in some of the outbreaks that have occurred.”

NFL players, coaches and staffers are being tested daily in the early stages of training camp. The league tweaked its testing procedures last week, requiring two confirmatory tests for any asymptomatic individual without a known history of infection who tests positive. That would address situations like that of Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, who spent time on the covid-19/reserve list after what the Lions later called a false positive.

“We’ll continue to learn from each of these environments and from each of these experiences,” Sills said. “But we’re just emphasizing that we’ve described the team environments as a virtual football bubble, meaning they’re all together obviously under our protocols during the large chunk of their day. When they leave, they’ve still got to adhere to those same principles and make good, responsible choices. And that’s something that we spent a lot of time [on] back on the educational aspects to make sure people understand how important that it.”