COVID-19 Protocols For Fantasy Football
“Yahoo Fantasy Football Hall of Fame” by Matthew Almon Roth is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
There’s a new uncontrollable factor to be dealt with when filling out your weekly fantasy football lineup. When it comes to punishing your team, sometimes this variable plays for keeps.
When the NFL opted to go ahead with the 2020 regular season absent the sort of isolated bubble setups employed by the NHL and NBA, an influx of COVID-19 was certain to impact the season, and thus your fantasy football roster, at some point.
As was the case with MLB, the other sport to opt for pandemic life sans a bubble, COVID-19 has arrived sooner rather than later.
Week 4 saw one game postponed and a second delayed. The Tennessee Titans-Pittsburgh Steelers contest suffered a postponement when 20 members of the Titans, last year’s AFC Championship Game finalists, tested positive for the coronavirus.
This game will now be played during Week 7.
Meanwhile, the meeting of the last two Super Bowl winners – the reigning title holders the Kansas City Chiefs and Super Bowl 53 champion New England Patriots – was pushed back from Sunday to Monday after Patriots starting quarterback Cam Newton tested positive for the virus, as did a member of KC’s practice squad.
A third game was briefly in jeopardy, but a second testing of New Orleans Saints fullback Michael Burton, who’d originally tested positive, proved to be a false positive and their game against the Detroit Lions was permitted to go ahead as scheduled.
Where Do They Go From Here?
Is this an aberration, or an indication of what’s ahead for the NFL?
At the start of the season, medical experts and epidemiologists were betting against the likelihood that the NFL would get all the way to Super Bowl 55 without a significant outbreak.
There’s been calls in some prominent circles for the NFL to pause the season and allow the ill to recoup and give the season more legitimacy. However, the league seems to be taking the approach that a positive COVID-19 test is no different than any other injury suffered during the course of a team’s year.
Shoulder separations and ACL tears aren’t contagious, however.
“Houston Texans vs. Tennessee Titans” byAJ Guel Photography is licensed underCC BY 2.0
Baseball Got Through It
Early-season COVID-19 outbreaks put both the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals in drydock for a lengthy stay. But even though both clubs were required to play a laundry list of doubleheaders to make up for the pause, both the Cardinals and Marlins qualified for postseason play.
The NFL appears to be taking its cue from the MLB experience, determined to soldier on though each positive test and outbreak. But it’s much easier for players to social distance on a baseball diamond than it is on the gridiron, where close, physical contact is basically the purpose of the game.
Fantasy Football COVID-19 Adjustments
Operators of some of the biggest online fantasy football leagues were also left scrambling to adjust to the new normal.
In ESPN’s fantasy football, it was determined that games played by Tuesday would always be counted toward the originally-scheduled matchup period. When games are rescheduled, those teams will be considered to be on a bye week and no roster relief will be permitted.
As well, players who are officially ruled out for that week’s game and those placed on the COVID-19 list will be marked as out (O) in the ESPN fantasy game and, therefore, would be IR-eligible.
Yahoo Fantasy is following virtually identical protocols. They also recommended that league commissioners consider expanding team rosters to enable competitors hit hard by COVID-19 positives to bolster their suddenly-weakened lineups.
Currently, the standard among leagues permits only two players per team to be placed on IR.
Filling That Lineup
Bye weeks are always a nightmare scenario for managers of fantasy football squads. That being said, no one factored in the possibility of the floating bye weeks that further COVID-19 outbreaks could create.
Fantasy teams who suddenly and unexpectedly lost access to Titans running back Derrick Henry or Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger at the last minute this week couldn’t possibly fill those voids. And since rosters must be filed by each Thursday, a late-week COVID-19 case like Newton’s offers the potential to cost a player their game that week.
In truth, there’s not much that can be done to protect against these developments. Your fantasy football team is just another victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.
