Vikings Have 8 Players on COVID List as Pandemic Season No. 2 Comes to a Close
Heading into the meaningless finale of a disappointing season, the Vikings once again have a lot of talent on the NFL's Reserve/COVID list. Absences due to positive tests have been a major issue all season, both for the Vikings and the league as a whole.
Kirk Cousins has been on the list since last week, which forced him to miss the Vikings' playoff-eliminating loss in Green Bay. Eric Kendricks, Camryn Bynum, Christian Darrisaw, Brian O'Neill, and Ezra Cleveland went on the list on Monday. Chris Herndon and Parry Nickerson joined the group on Tuesday, bringing the current total up to eight players, even with Nick Vigil and Patrick Jones II coming off the list this week. Most notably, that's three-fifths of the offensive line.
The league recently changed its protocols, so all of those players will have a chance to be cleared before Sunday's game against the Bears if they're asymptomatic and test negative. But it's unclear how many will come off the list before then — and if the Vikings would play them in a game that means nothing. For now, all we know is that Mike Zimmer has said he plans on playing his starters.
The Vikings came into this season as one of the least vaccinated teams in the league, and unsurprisingly, they had a bunch of key players miss games while on the list.
"I think maybe every one of our unvaccinated players has gotten it," Zimmer said. "But a lot of our vaccinated players have as well. We've lost [Dalvin] Tomlinson, we've lost Cousins, we've lost — I mean, even [Danielle] Hunter had it and he wasn't playing anymore. Harrison Smith for two weeks. I'm sure there's a lot more that I don't remember right now. It's a lot of juggling."
Zimmer didn't mention Dalvin Cook, Adam Thielen, or Alexander Mattison, who also missed games.
Unvaccinated players were more likely to test positive and miss time because they tested more frequently. But vaccinated players also ended up on the list at a high rate, particularly in the second half of the season with the surge of the Omicron variant. It's been a weird season for everyone in the NFL, as you never knew who was going to pop up with a positive test and potentially be out for that week's game.
The league ended up adjusting its protocols late in the year because so many asymptomatic players were testing positive and being forced to sit out.
"I think that the last two years have been extremely difficult with all the things — not just us obviously, for every team — going through all the different things that they have to do," Zimmer said. "Coming in today, I get a text and there's five guys on the COVID list. You know, it's just part of life in 2021, I guess."
The hope is that this won't be as much of an issue in 2022 as it has been for the past two years, but it's hard to confidently say that will be the case.
“I think [the protocols] will probably have to change, off the top of my head," K.J. Osborn said. "I think they’ll probably have to change. I mean, they were changing throughout the season, whether that was not rescheduling games, or testing every day or one time a week, or intensive protocols. But, I mean, it’s new. I know it’s the second year, but [the pandemic] is relatively new for everybody. Nobody has the playbook for all this stuff, so the people that are making the rules, I’m sure they’re trying their best — just like everybody else is trying their best — to follow the rules. It’s an evolving thing, but the people that are in charge, they’re trying their best."
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