Barber: Raiders flunking their coronavirus test

If the coronavirus were a competition, rather than a deadly pandemic that spreads its burden among all of us, the Las Vegas Raiders would be relegated from the NFL to the second-tier English Football League Championship. They are failing their COVID test.

I haven’t written about the Raiders much lately, because they elected no longer to be a local Northern California sports team. Out of Bay, out of mind.

If I had previously written about them, I would have lavished them with praise. The Raiders’ victory at Kansas City in Week 5 was one of the franchise’s greatest on-field moments of the past 25 years. The team clearly has made some good personnel moves under Jon Gruden and Mike Mayock. The roster is improving, and Derek Carr is playing like an MVP candidate. Vegas’ two losses, to Buffalo and at New England, were respectable.

Alas, the window for complimenting the Raiders has closed, now that they have emerged as the worst virus managers in the NFL. They are the football equivalent of a Fort Lauderdale pool party.

Let us count the ways.

First, there was Gruden failing to wear his mask properly on the sideline during early-season games. At worst, it was dangled below his bare nose; at best, the thing looked like a skimpy bikini bottom. Then there was the unauthorized team employee who entered the Raiders locker room (only 40 non-players are designated to enter) following a home win against the Saints. I would call those minor transgressions in the grand scheme of epidemiology.

Tight end Darren Waller’s fundraiser in Henderson, Nevada, was worse. We like charity fundraisers. We like Darren Waller, a great comeback story. We like that his foundation focuses on preventing addiction and helping young people during recovery and treatment. But when several of his teammates, including Carr, were photographed in a state of undress ― that is, not wearing masks at the indoor event ― it became a PR nightmare. And it could have been a medical nightmare.

Those three infractions resulted in cumulative fines of $300,000 to the Raiders, $100,000 to Gruden and $165,000 to various Las Vegas players.

And now comes the most consequential screw-up yet. Starting right tackle Trent Brown tested positive for coronavirus earlier this week. When he did, it was discovered that Brown had occasionally removed his Kinexon sensor, a device the NFL is using to alert players and coaches when they get too close to one another, and to track contacts in the case of a positive test result. A subsequent probe, a joint investigation by the NFL and NFLPA, revealed multiple social distancing infractions by players at Raiders practices.

Joining Brown in the team’s COVID protocol are the rest of the Las Vegas starting offensive linemen ― Kolton Miller, Gabe Jackson, Rodney Hudson and Denzelle Good ― plus safety Jonathan Abram, who had close contact with Brown, and cornerback Damon Arnette.

As far as most of us know, none of those other O-linemen have tested positive. They were sent home because they had mingled with Brown. But the Raiders’ latest indiscretions will bring more than monetary consequences.

At the very least, they won’t have Brown, a fantastic blocker, for this week’s game against Tampa Bay. The offensive line will certainly be impacted in other ways. Putting four linemen on the field who haven’t practiced together all week is a significant detriment. It might be concerning enough for the Raiders to deactivate some or all of those players.

Not ideal when the Raiders are trying to outscore the 4-2 Buccaneers and their up-and-coming young quarterback, Tom Brady.

On top of that, the Vegas-Tampa game had been scheduled for Sunday night. No way the NFL was going to risk losing a primetime event, so it flexed the game to Sunday afternoon. That shouldn’t affect the competitive balance much. But NFL people love to play in night games, when their peers across the league are tuning in. It’s definitely a hit to the Raiders’ stature to lose that visibility.

But are those self-inflicted penalties enough?

I keep thinking about the nursing homes and assisted living facilities ― some right here in Sonoma County ― that have been devastated by the pandemic. I’m pretty sure very few of the old people who have died of COVID-19 in those homes contracted the virus in a bar or at a church service. Some of them never left the premises. They died because a younger staff member contracted the virus and brought it to them.

I can’t judge the individual spreaders without knowing their situations. The point is that when a healthy young person contracts this pathogen, it can have deadly consequences even if the spreader never gets so much as a sniffle. Trent Brown reportedly is feeling all right, and I’m sincerely glad he is. The greater risk is that he passed the ’rona to a friend, who passed it to another who works as a primary caregiver or first responder. This stuff is real, and the Raiders are treating it like a joke.

But let me speak in a dialect in which the NFL is more fluent, the language of money. A professional sports season is a precarious thing right now. Major League Baseball very nearly derailed itself with positive coronavirus tests until players and staff began to understand out how easy it was to get games postponed. They cleaned up their mess and made it to the World Series.

In a way, the NFL is in a more precarious spot than MLB. It’s a league with bigger rosters, and the game has a lot more physical contact than baseball. Even daily testing is no guaranteed antidote to missed games, and no one is going to be playing any makeup doubleheaders in football. This thing can go off the rails in a hurry if teams start making terrible decisions ― start acting like the Raiders.

The fines were a logical place to start, but clearly they aren’t working for Las Vegas. What’s next? For one thing, don’t move the Raiders-Bucs game to Monday or Tuesday. There is talk of the NFL doing that, but why give the Raiders’ starting offensive linemen more time to prepare? Send Carr out there behind a line of Brandon Parker, John Simpson, Andre James, Patrick Osameh and Sam Young, backed up by practice squad call-ups. And I would recommend a lot of short passing.

That also might not be enough. The Raiders may need to lose draft picks, or home games. Get creative. But get tough.

There’s an old line from the James Bond novel “Goldfinger”: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Well, four times is nothing but reckless stupidity, and it’s time the Raiders answered for it.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.