The Dallas Cowboys-Baltimore Ravens game Tuesday was initially set for last Thursday, but bumped, and bumped, and bumped again thanks to the reschedulings of the Ravens’ previous game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. And while the game did get underway Tuesday night, its start carried quite an interesting moment, with Fox’s Jay Glazer relaying the news on the pre-game show that Ravens’ receiver Dez Bryant had received an inconclusive test Tuesday morning, went to the stadium for warmups, was pulled and tested again, and tested positive:
Breaking news from @JayGlazer: Ravens WR Dez Bryant will not play tonight vs. his former team the Cowboys after testing positive for COVID-19. He was taken off of the field during warm ups. pic.twitter.com/uJ06AMV7fE
— FOX Sports: NFL (@NFLonFOX) December 9, 2020
Part of what’s interesting there is not just Glazer’s report on the details, but the response from analyst Howie Long of “You wonder how they deal with the contract tracing.” And host Curt Menafee, after showing Bryant’s tweets on this, discussed some of the game-day testing protocols that led to this, and mentioned the Justin Turner situation in baseball.
“It’s one of those situations where, like you said, contact tracing, all that kind of stuff, they do day-of-game testing now, and that’s why sometimes it happens…we saw it happen in baseball with a player who’s on the field. Luckily for everyone, this game hadn’t started yet.”
On the contact tracing front, ESPN’s Kevin Seifert and SI’s Albert Breer later offered some more clarity on the contact tracing the league did after the Bryant test and what the results were:
Whenever a player tests positive for COVID-19, the NFL conducts contact tracing and determines who (if anyone) qualifies as a high-risk close contact. If there are any Ravens who do, after the Dez Bryant positive result, they would have to be pulled from this game as well.
— Kevin Seifert (@SeifertESPN) December 9, 2020
The NFL did contact tracing off Dez Bryant’s positive test tonight, per source, and didn’t have pull any additional Ravens from the game.
— Albert Breer (@AlbertBreer) December 9, 2020
So that’s why the game was still played without any further players removed. But this is still definitely concerning, especially with this being on a team that’s been facing large numbers of COVID-19 positives in the past few weeks. And as for Bryant, his response here was also notable. Here’s his first tweet on this:
Tell me why they pull me from warming up so I can go get tested… my shit come back positive… I tested positive for Covid WTF
— Dez Bryant (@DezBryant) December 9, 2020
And here’s Bryant saying later that this is going to be it for him for the season:
Yea I’m going to go ahead and call it a quit for the rest of the season… I can’t deal with this
— Dez Bryant (@DezBryant) December 9, 2020
So that’s certainly an unusual start to an unusual Thursday Night Football (On Tuesday) game.
