“But, deep down inside — and forgive me for putting it this way — it just p—– me off.”
Little did he know what awaited him after those comments.
In the 72 hours after his Washington Football Team thrashed the Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day, Rivera learned that all team facilities would shut down Monday and Tuesday; that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ meeting with the Baltimore Ravens was postponed a second time because of a surge in positive coronavirus tests; and that the Denver Broncos would play without a quarterback on their roster after contact-tracing revealed they were “high-risk.”
And Monday, he learned that Washington’s Dec. 13 game against the 49ers will be played in Arizona because of an emergency order in Santa Clara, Calif., banning all sporting activities for at least three weeks.
Rivera’s life has been thrown upside down this year as he’s navigated a rebuild with a new team that is changing names and dealing with allegations from its past, while also managing his own cancer diagnosis and the weight of a global pandemic.
For Rivera, the “players’ coach” whose reputation is built largely on human interaction, the virtual world is challenging.
“I’m one person that is not fond of the Zoom concept and holding meetings with Zoom because it’s hard to see everybody’s reactions,” Rivera said, via Zoom, with reporters on Monday. “Sometimes I say something sarcastic and I want to see your guys’ reaction and I can’t and some people might take it the wrong way. So I’ve tried not to be sarcastic because sarcasm and humor do not translate. So I’ve tried to be aware of that.
“And so it’s hard and you get frustrated and honestly, being told … that we were going into these next steps of protocol, that was frustrating. It really was. But I understand. I get it. We have to be safe.”
Rivera, the team’s de facto general manager, has had to manage a roster in new ways to account for potential emergency situations, such as that faced by the Broncos, and ensure backups at critical positions stay available. The team signed kicker/punter Kaare Vedvik to its practice squad for that very reason, but their quarterbacks room, which started with four players, is down to three after the season-ending injury to Kyle Allen.
“We try to make sure that on certain times, the backups, the practice squad guys understand that they’ve got to stay separated,” Rivera said. “So we’re trying to reinforce that even more so now. It’s something that we’ve talked about as a staff this week is that we’ve got to make sure that these guys all understand they’ve got it. They’ve got to maintain the social distance.”
Rivera has thought about the possibility that the NFL might have to pause its season, or even be unable to finish it. The league has altered its testing protocols over the course of the season and implemented more stringent mask-wearing rules that come with heavy fines for violations.
But it has yet to cancel any games, even with an increase in cases. Even among teams that have only 10 starters (Baltimore) or no quarterbacks (Denver) or no home stadium (San Francisco).
The NFL’s Week 12 chaos did leave Washington with some uncertainty. Its Week 13 game in Pittsburgh on Sunday — which is on for now but could change if players test positive before the weekend — and in Week 14, Washington will play the 49ers in State Farm Stadium, home of the Arizona Cardinals, instead of Santa Clara.
Then to close out the season, Washington returns home for meetings with Rivera’s old team, the Panthers, and the Seattle Seahawks, before heading to Philadelphia with possibly a playoff berth on the line.
“We are monitoring it, but one guy that it affects right now, more so than anyone else, is our director of football operations, Paul Kelly,” he said. “So I’m going to let him do all the worrying and I’ll try to hopefully keep everybody focused on Pittsburgh.”
Washington (4-7) is second in the NFC East after the New York Giants’ victory on Sunday, and how it handles the uncertainty and difficult stretch of opponents may ultimately become measuring sticks of its growth.
Washington returns to practice Wednesday, and Rivera’s message is simple: “Be ready.”
“You got to talk about it,” he said. “And that’s really the only thing that we’ve done is we’ve just talked about the situation we’re in and we try to make sure guys understand how important it is to be adaptable. … I’ve told the coaches this and I’ve told the players, we can’t make a big deal if something changes. When you start worrying about that, what was interesting becomes important. And that’s what we don’t want to happen. It’s not important. It’s interesting. It’s different. We deal with it and we move on.”
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