To date, Notre Dame has earned nothing but praise from the sports media for how it’s handled its reporting of COVID-19 cases, and deservedly so. The school has released regular testing updates and been fully transparent about the results. It certainly helped that most of the news they delivered was good: Only a small handful of positive cases over the summer, and none that affected the coming season.

Tuesday afternoon, that changed in a big way, as almost two dozen ND players are now either COVID-positive or in contact-tracing isolation. The Irish have halted football activities and postponed Saturday’s scheduled Wake Forest game.

When the Irish held 7 players from the depth chart out of the South Florida game, not that much was made of it beyond on-field effects, which were thankfully minimal because the Bulls are awful and the guys that had to step in played very well. (However, coach Brian Kelly was concerned enough about it that he reminded his team to mask up before they left the locker room following the victory.)

Things seemed fairly normal as recently as Monday, when the school announced four positives in the latest week of testing and six isolations. Because ND didn’t say anything about players not on the depth chart for Saturday, one could easily assume that those 10 affected players included the seven that had already been disclosed.

As you see in the Tweet above, the latest round of testing revealed that (presumably) those players who were positive infected some other players, and subsequent contact tracing has now sidelined about a quarter of the roster.

(There was a natural question about whether USF itself might have helped contribute to these numbers, but USF reporter Joey Knight Tweeted today that all of last Friday’s and this Monday’s tests there came back negative, so it doesn’t appear that was the case. Hopefully for the Bulls’ sake, there weren’t any unknown infections transmitted their way from ND’s guys.)

Obviously, this is a bummer for multiple reasons, most notably that the Irish have joined a long list of programs whose schedules have already been affected by COVID-19. (Houston, most infamously, hasn’t even played yet but has had 4 different games postponed or canceled by their opponents, including one that was scheduled in response to another cancellation.)

The idea that ND would avoid any COVID issues in this unusual season was always one rooted more in optimism than realism, so in the macro sense, this news is not a surprise. However, it’s unfortunate that so many Irish players have already had the virus; if we assume no reinfections, 25 members of the roster have tested positive, and who knows if more might be coming in the next round of tests. To date, no hospitalizations have been necessary that we know of, so that’s good, but you always want your guys’ numbers to be as low as possible. That’s clearly not going to happen for ND.

As for the less-important fate of the Wake game, the two teams were both scheduled to be off next Saturday, Oct. 3, so it could theoretically be played then. However, given the scale of the outbreak at ND, it seems unlikely the team will be able to resume football activities in time to play it. Honestly, I’m just hoping things can be ramped back up in time for Oct. 10 against Florida State.

That leaves Dec. 12, which the ACC gave as one of two possible dates for the league championship game (the other was Dec. 19, offering maximum flexibility). That seems the more likely option, although it obviously removes any remaining ability to move things around if other COVID issue comes up with ND or an opponent.