Jon Gruden: Raiders ready to play Buccaneers on Sunday afternoon

Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden might be without his entire first-choice offensive line, but he isn't letting that stop him from guiding his team onto the field for what became a Sunday afternoon game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 

"We're going to play Sunday at 1 o'clock they tell me, and we'll be ready to go," Gruden told reporters on Friday, per Paul Gutierrez of ESPN. 

The NFL flexed the Buccaneers-Raiders contest, taking place in Nevada, from Sunday's prime-time slot to ensure fans would get a night game in the event that Tampa Bay-Vegas has to be postponed. Raiders offensive tackle Trent Brown tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this week and has been joined on the reserve/COVID-19 list by the other four starting linemen and safety Johnathan Abram, who were all deemed high-risk close contacts. 

High-risk contacts must isolate for five days plus the day of exposure before they're eligible to be cleared. The linemen could play on Sunday as long as they test negative because they were last exposed to Brown on Monday. Abram had contact with Brown on Tuesday and won't be cleared through the end of the weekend.  

"I do believe there's a good chance those men will be back soon," Gruden said of his missing linemen minus Brown, who can't play until he returns negative tests and reports no symptoms. 

On Thursday, NFL chief medical officer Dr. Allen Sills told NFL Network's Judy Battista about the league's updated health and safety protocols:

"As soon as we get a positive test, we provisionally identify potential high-risk close contacts, and we remove all those individuals right away.

"And then there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into really fine-tuning that high-risk contact list. That includes, obviously, the KINEXON proximity tracking device data, but it also includes in-person interviews with those individuals, asking them about who they were around and the situations, and it includes video review. We take video from inside the facility and on the practice field and try to look for exposures there.

"So we take all of that information together, and then we take that preliminary list and determine a final list of high-risk contacts. So that's the same process that we've gone through in the Las Vegas situation."

The Seattle Seahawks at Arizona Cardinals game was shifted to the "SNF" broadcast slot.