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I’ll let the tweets on this speak for themselves:
Baylor expected to release updated data later today, but here’s the number. 28 football players + 14 football staffers. https://t.co/cvRwzzicjY
— Max Olson (@max_olson) October 12, 2020
These are ... just incredible numbers. Terrible in every way. Approximately 1⁄4 of the entire football roster is currently positive and, although I don’t know exactly how many “staffers” we have, I assume that has to be a significant percentage.
When Baylor announced last week that it was suspending football activities, we could assume that it had to be because the numbers were bad. Yesterday’s postponement of this Saturday’s game against Oklahoma State basically cemented that. But these are really bad. And recognizing full well that I am not a doctor or disease specialist in any way, it seems likely that these numbers will get worse before they get better considering how many of our players live together, socialize together, and spend significant amounts of time together in football and non-football activities.
As Max says in the tweet above, we should get more detailed numbers from Baylor Athletics later today and possibly more specific information from contact tracing and the like. For now it appears, based on some of Mack’s other comments earlier today, that they believe there was a false negative for someone that traveled with the team to Morgantown, and that trip was the genesis of what we’re seeing now.
We’ll keep you posted on things as they develop, including any news that might come up about our next scheduled against against Texas in Austin on October 24.
UPDATE:
Craig Smoak tweeted this right before I hit “publish.”
Also add 44 close-contact cases in athletics, who are in quarantine, 17 of those which are also in football. https://t.co/yt4gnbz9KS
— Craig Smoak (@CraigSmoak) October 12, 2020
28 positives plus 17 others in quarantine is 45 total players that are currently unavailable. No wonder we aren’t practicing this week; more than a third of the roster is out.