The past week in sports has seen disruption once again, this time from the COVID-19 ominicron variant.
Sports leagues such as the NFL and NBA have seen new precautions taken from rescheduling games to implementing old and new mandates throughout their leagues.
With bowl season and the College Football Playoffs quickly approaching, there have been concerns over whether the games will be played without any disruption.
Alabama head coach Nick Saban said on Monday that the team has reimplemented its COVID-19 regulations from a season ago with players, coaches and other staff wearing masks while in the facilities while also being mindful of social distancing ahead of the team’s holiday break.
“We let out players go home for the break last year and we educate the families,” Saban said. “We give them a care package with everything they need to stay safe and we have implemented all of the protocols here since we’ve been back, that we had last year in terms of wearing masks in meetings, washing hands, social distancing in meetings and we’re encouraging the players to do that when they leave here. So we’re really putting the protocols in place that we used a year ago which was helpful to us and we’re gonna keep doing that.”
Saban also shared that over 90 percent of his players have received a COVID-19 booster shot throughout the season.
“We’ve done a good job of vaccinating our players,” Saban said. “We’ve also done a good job of giving out players booster shots — I think we have over 90 percent of the players have gotten booster shots. So they really kind of bought into doing trying to do everything they can to stay safe, but there’s no guarantees so we wanna use every protocol we can to help them stay safe.”
Alabama has been on top of vaccinations since the beginning of the season. Ahead of the fall camp, Saban shared during SEC Media Days in July, that the Crimson Tide had close to 90 percent of players vaccinated before a ball was even snapped at practice.
Last season, the Crimson Tide did not have any reported COVID-19 cases following the holiday season, when the players were allowed to travel back home. Despite the implementation, Saban is still concerned for the player’s safety and is trying to best educate his team to take the necessary steps to ensure their safety.
“Am I concerned? I’m always concerned when there’s an issue out there and we want to do the best we can to help out players be concerned about the issue and respect it so they have the best opportunity to stay safe.”
Should everything go well, Alabama will kickoff against Cincinnati in the College Football Playoff Semifinal on Friday, Dec. 31., at 2:30 p.m. CT from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX.
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
