Ron Rivera can’t seem to get through to his team. Despite urging his players to get vaccinated for COVID-19, as of Monday, only 60 percent of Washington’s roster had received the vaccine, the lowest rate of any team in the league. Montez Sweat, who is entering his third NFL season, said in June he had no plans to get inoculated and expressed that he wasn’t a “fan” of Rivera summoning a vaccine expert from Harvard to speak with players during minicamp earlier this summer.
Washington’s entire coaching staff is vaccinated, but because so many of his players aren’t, Rivera has continued to wear a mask around the team’s facility.
"I believe we're over 50%, so we're trending in the right direction. We're not where we want to be," he said Tuesday.
“I’m truly frustrated. I’m beyond frustrated. And part of it is the reason I walked in with a mask on is I'm immune deficient,” said Rivera, a cancer survivor. "So with this new variant, who knows? So when I'm in a group and the group's not vaccinated, or there's mixture, I've put the mask on for health reasons cause nobody really knows. I have to do that and I just wish and I hope that our guys can understand that.”
"I'm not going to tell anybody what to do," Rivera added. "I'm going to try and understand them and give them some reasons why I think it would be a good thing and we'll see how it goes, but I hope we can get to these guys, get them to understand really it's not just for them, but it's for the people around them. And that's the thing that I think hopefully will get their attention."
Rivera also addressed the on-field issues of having a team with a low vaccination rate.
“It becomes a real disadvantage in terms of preparation," he told the media. "If you've got a guy that's going to miss out on two weeks of work, I think when you get into the regular season and you wake up Saturday morning and they'd come in and tell you that you've got five guys that can't play on Sunday and it's your starting group, that's going to shake your team up. We saw what happened, unfortunately, to Denver last year, they had to start a wide receiver at quarterback. You don't want to be in that situation. We don't want to be in that situation. So it could be a huge, huge disadvantage."
Players’ reluctance to get the vaccine has been a frequent talking point in the lead-up to training camp. Cole Beasley’s refusal to get vaccinated is already causing locker-room division in Buffalo while Vikings coordinator Rick Dennison was reassigned for declining the vaccine.
“The unvaccinated players are going to have a hard time during the season. They are going to be wearing masks, they’re going to have to social distance, they’ll have daily testing. They won’t go home for the bye week and have to come back here and test every day,” said Vikings coach Mike Zimmer, warning of the daily inconveniences unvaccinated players will face. “When we go on the road, they won’t be able to go out to dinner with anybody. They’ll have to travel on busses differently and travel on planes differently, so a lot of meetings will be virtual like we have here.”
The NFL announced last week that if a game can’t be rescheduled due to an outbreak of unvaccinated players, the team with the outbreak would have to forfeit. Cardinals receiver DeAndre Hopkins vented about the new policy on social media, threatening to retire in a since-deleted tweet.
Per NFL.com’s Nick Shook, 85 percent of players have received at least one COVID shot with 14 of the league’s 32 teams reaching the 90-percent threshold. With COVID cases again on the rise due to breakthrough cases and the rapidly-spreading Delta variant, the CDC has amended its guidelines, announcing Tuesday that masks are recommended for all schools K-12 and certain indoor settings, regardless of vaccination status.
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