With the Buccaneers having three players who misrepresented their vaccination status, there’s a good chance that other players on other teams did the same thing. So what, if anything, has the NFL or the NFL Players Association done to explore the possibility that Antonio Brown et al. are the tip of the iceberg?
We posed that question earlier today to both the league and the union. The union has not yet responded. The league has.
According to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, 80 percent of all players were vaccinated at the club facilities. For them, there’s nothing to vet.
Of course, that leaves the other 20 percent. According to McCarthy, the NFL “checked with clubs this week to see if there was a differential between the number of positive cases among players vaccinated off site versus those on site.” He said there was “no difference.”
This means that the league has not yet vetted the cards submitted by the 20 percent of all players who received vaccinations away from the team facility. Instead, the league has asked the team whether the percentage of positive tests from players vaccinated at the facility is any different thank the percentage of positive tests from players vaccinated elsewhere. It isn’t, and that apparently is the end of it.
Obviously, that’s technically irrelevant to whether players are lying about their vaccination status. To know for sure, the cards need to be fully vetted.
And while it may be difficult to do, the league did it with Brown, Mike Edwards, and John Franklin III.
So, basically, there may be other unvaccinated players who are masquerading as vaccinated. Unless and until they stiff their live-in chefs, we won’t know whether that’s the case.