Stanford latest to skip town over restrictions

The Stanford football team on Tuesday joined a growing list of displaced sports teams that are jumping state and county lines to keep playing sports amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement, the school said the team would travel to Seattle to prepare for its game Saturday at Washington and then travel to Corvallis, Oregon, to prepare for its game the following week against Oregon State – a game that has been moved from Stanford to Oregon State.

The moves follow an emergency directive from Santa Clara County issued Saturday that forbids contact sports in the California county for three weeks, one of several measures it has issued to address the rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. The directive also affects the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, who are temporarily moving to Arizona, and the San Jose State Spartans, who are expected to announce a temporary home soon.

“There is no question that contact sports – where we have seen outbreaks across the nation – is an activity that inherently cannot be done with social distancing, and there have been outbreaks on teams across the country,” Santa Clara County said in response to a question about the ban on contact sports.

The county said its priority is to protect hospital capacity to ensure people get the critical care they need. It previously said it was disappointed when the San Jose State football team moved out of the county before the season to avoid other county health restrictions that limited its ability to prepare for the season. The Spartans instead bused up to Humboldt County, 325 miles north, where the restrictions were looser on public gatherings, allowing them to practice more normally.

Public health experts have said that boundary jumping sends a bad message to the public.