NFL postpones three games amid COVID-19 case surge among players

Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer breaks down which NFL games will be moved this weekend and how players can return to action.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: There's a great deal of news breaking regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the omicron variant. Let's get right now to Josh Schaffer. He's got news that will disappoint some NFL fans. Josh.

JOSH SCHAFFER: Yeah, Adam, the NFL just announced that they'll be moving three games this weekend to later in the weekend. This comes after 100-- over 100 players have been added to the COVID-19 reserve list this week alone. So the games that are going to be moved is the Cleveland Browns against the Oakland Raider or the Los Angeles Raiders, I should say Las Vegas Raiders. That's going to be moved to Monday.

And then we're going to have the Los Angeles Rams game also moved against the Seattle Seahawks to Tuesday. And the Washington Football Team game against the Eagles is also going to be moved to Tuesday. So the Washington Football Team, the Los Angeles Rams, and the Cleveland Browns are kind of the teams of concern here that have had a lot of COVID-19 cases come up over the past week.

Now nearly 95% of NFL players are vaccinated. And the NFL did just update their protocols. So how this is going to work is vaccinated players can come back after being asymptomatic for 24 hours and providing two negative tests.

So the NFL is hoping that some of these players will be able to do that in the next few days and there'll be more players able to play when these games are played later in the week. Also, worth noting here, something that didn't happen with these games last year, fans are supposed to come to these games. Unsure sure what's going to happen with if fans can be refunded, if they can't attend a 5 PM game on a Tuesday, not exactly something that people plan for, but COVID-19 is certainly surging, and it's impacting the NFL.

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right, Josh, thank you very much. See you at the post-meeting after the show.