Miami Dolphins settle on rookie report date. Where things stand
The Miami Dolphins have decided to push back the day that rookies report to team facilities.
The NFL is permitting teams to bring rookies to their facilities beginning on Tuesday, but the Dolphins won’t have their rookies report until Thursday, according to three league sources.
The Dolphins began to inform their rookies on Saturday afternoon.
NFL teams are allowed to begin full squad training camp on July 28, and the Dolphins are expected to begin on that day.
The NFL informed teams Saturday that rookies, quarterbacks and injured players should report to their respective training camps next week — and that includes clubs like the Dolphins operating in coronavirus hotspots.
The memo — sent by Troy Vincent, the league’s executive vice president of football operations — stipulated that, under the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, all teams but the Chiefs and Texans (who have an earlier start) can compel rookies to report as early as Tuesday and quarterbacks and injured players on Thursday.
According to NFL Network, rookies will take COVID-19 tests on their first day at the team facility (Thursday in the Dolphins’ case) and then immediately go home, then do the exact same thing on the second day. Full physicals will be taken on the third day.
The NFL’s memo to teams is just the latest sign that the league is determined to stay on schedule despite a lack of COVID-19 testing protocol. The league and the union still have also not yet agreed on how to handle the massive budget shortfalls teams expect due to stadium capacity reductions.
NFL Network reported Saturday that the league, for now, is capping the number of players allowed inside the practice facility at any time at 20. Exceeding that limit could result in a grievance.
The news comes a day after the NFL players union officials told reporters that they have expressed concern to the NFL about opening training camps in markets that have become hot spots for COVID-19, but team doctors from those handful of markets told them late this week that they believe it’s safe to do so.
The union has not asked for training camps in those hot spots — primarily South Florida, Houston, Phoenix and Los Angeles — to be relocated, and there’s no indication that the league is planning to do so.
Miami-Dade and Broward counties reported nearly 4,400 new COVID-19 confirmed cases and 23 new deaths Saturday.
Even though they can mandate rookies report Tuesday, it was not immediately clear if the Dolphins will, or push back the start.
According to a close associate of one Dolphins rookie, the team conveyed weeks ago that it was possible rookies might report July 23 or July 26 instead of July 21, but that a decision hadn’t been made.
The Dolphins currently have 22 rookies on their roster, highlighted by quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, the fifth-overall pick in April’s draft.
If the plan holds, they will be asked in the coming days to travel to South Florida, which is at the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.
“A couple of weeks ago, we started to raise concerns about spikes in a number of jurisdictions, including yours [South Florida],” NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith said. “Our job as a union is to hold the league accountable to providing as safe a workforce as possible.”
Late in the week, the union called “for an emergency meeting of all of the team doctors who are the head of their medical practices for the teams in quote, unquote hot spot areas to address those very questions.”
Smith said the doctors, during that Thursday night phone call, “said, with a couple of reservations, that it was safe to open training camp and they provided their medical reasons. Some we agreed with and some we may not of….One reason we became increasingly alarmed about Houston and these other hot spots is the impact of available hospital beds and ICU beds.”
This story was originally published July 18, 2020 at 11:28 AM.
