WAITING GAME
Contact tracing is a roller coaster for football coaches and players
NORMAN — OU wasn't the only team that went down to the wire on whether it would play its season opener.
Kansas State coach Chris Klieman said his team was the same way before its seasonopener against Arkansas State two weeks ago.
“Honestly we were waiting for the test Friday at 5 o'clock to push us ahead from one of the threshold positions — whether
that's O-line, D-line or quarterback — that we could play,” Klieman said Monday ahead of the Sooners game against the Wildcats at 11 a.m. Saturday.
While OU has not released football-specific COVID-19 testing data in recent weeks, the athletic department did release its overall testing numbers for the first time since August.
Those numbers painted an optimistic outlook, with just more than 1% of the overall tests coming back positive last week — a significant decline from the previous two week's numbers, according to the release.
But for Oklahoma, Kansas State and all other teams in college football, contact tracing has been just as much of a concern as positive tests.
A player who has close contact with someone who tests positive has to be held out for two weeks before returning. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control say contact tracing is done for individuals who have spent 15 or more minutes around someone who tested positive for COVID-19 or is probable for the disease and those individuals should quarantine for 14 days from their last exposure to the positive individual.
That can lead to a rollercoaster for coaches, as K lie man pointed out Monday.
The Wildcats were without about 40 players for their opener.
“We were excited because we were able to get 12 kids back on Monday after that game,” Klieman said. “Lo and behold, we've lost probably another 10 to tracing or a positive (test) over the past week so you take two steps forward and you end up taking a step-and-a-half or two back.”
Klieman, like OU coach Lincoln Riley has said several times recently, said he'd be holding his breath this week as his team went through testing Wednesday and Friday.
The team went through the first of their three weekly tests Sunday.
“We meet those thresholds to play as of today. I hope we can still meet them on Wednesday and Friday,”
Klieman said. “Whether we're down guys or not, our guys want to play, but we also have to make sure that it's safe for the guys that are out there.
“And I know everybody is kind of waiting on a day-today basis and that's the tricky part that all of us are dealing with.”
Riley said OU would be in communications with opponents on where they stood testing-wise.
“The way I've understood it is, if we feel like we've got any potential issues for being able to play the game, then we'll try to communicate those to a conference opponent and all that as soon as we possibly can,” Riley said.
“Then I would suspect that once we have the final test before game-time done, then that's when communication with the opposing team would happen.”
While the Sunday and Wednesday tests take most of a day to 24 hours for results to be available, the Friday test is a rapid one that Riley said yielded all of the results about two hours after testing was completed.
But that doesn't change the reality of contact tracing, where a player must be held out for 14 days, and can be held out for that multiple times without having ever tested positive.
OU defensive back Tre Norwood confirmed l ast week that he was held out for at least one two-week stretch due to that regulation.
“I was upset with t he whole contact-tracing thing, but I just had to make the best of that opportunity that I had,” Norwood said.