The Detroit Lions are NFL guinea pigs once again after the Matthew Stafford false-positive test result for COVID-19 saga.
If the NFL has an obscure rule or situation, you can be sure the Lions will fall victim to exposing it. The list of situations in which the Lions have come out on the wrong end of is extensive — the Catch Rule in Chicago, the flag pick up in Dallas, 10-second runoff against the Falcons, the Jim Schwartz challenge flag on Thanksgiving, the Seahawks batting the ball out the back of the end zone on Monday night, etc. — I digress. Sorry for the reminders.
After Stafford received a false-positive COVID-19 test result last week and was forced to spend five days away from Lions training camp, it exposed another flaw in the league’s approach to testing.
Fortunately for the Lions, Stafford is fully healthy — as is his family — and this occurred in training camp, rather than the regular season making it a more manageable situation. But as MMQB’s Albert Breer pointed out, if “Stafford’s positive test came on Friday, Sept. 11, rather (than) Friday, July 31” there would be a much bigger problem as Stafford would have been unjustly forced to miss Week 1 of the regular season.
This situation raised enough red flags that the NFL and NFLPA went back into discussions to come up with a solution that would help prevent a false-positive test result from drastically impacting a team, while also keeping player safety as their top priority.
ESPN’s Kevin Seifert posted the entire memorandum of updates to the COVID-19 testing on social media, with the most important part of the memo highlighted here:
In Stafford’s situation, he received two negative results, then a positive (which turned out to be a false-positive), and that was followed by three more negative test results — but under the old rules he was still forced to remain out of Allen Park for five days.
Now, if that same set of circumstances happened again, a player with an established history of negative results, followed by a positive result and the player remaining asymptomatic, the player can theoretically return to the team’s facility after fewer tests and in fewer days (assuming testing is done in a timely fashion).
This is a step in the right direction for the league keeping players safe while not punishing teams for inaccurate testing results. As we continue to move through uncharted territories, more situations like this are bound to happen again — let’s just hope the Lions are done being the guinea pigs.