If you have been following Trojans Wire during the pandemic, especially over the past month, you have seen several articles about the need for college basketball to find the right plan to play a 2021 season and, crucially, have a 2021 NCAA Tournament and Final Four after the 2020 tournament unavoidably had to be canceled due to the onset of the pandemic.
Few would dispute the claim that if college basketball is to have a 2021 NCAA Tournament, the sport needs a bubble plan — maybe not an exact replication of what the NBA has done in Orlando, but certainly the same basic concepts on a smaller scale. The general outlines and processes need to be carried over from the NBA to college hoops.
Dan Wolken of USA TODAY wrote about these matters in a Friday afternoon report. The fact that a bubble plan is being considered is certainly welcome and important news.
From the column:
“My staff has been working hard on it and talking to all 32 commissioners and there are ways to do this,” Emmert said during a 30-minute interview posted to the NCAA’s media platforms Thursday. “I’m completely confident we can figure this out.”
Yet, the even bigger and more newsworthy portions of Wolken’s report are not the debates over a bubble plan, but the statements revealing just how much urgency there is among college basketball coaches to have a season:
“’Dan Gavitt has been telling us they have to play the tournament,’ said one Power Five coach, referring to the NCAA’s vice president of men’s basketball and speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect conversations that were supposed to be private.”
Wolken put forth a concept very similar to what we outlined at Trojans Wire weeks ago:
“But imagine a scenario where, for example, the ACC brings all of its teams to Greensboro for the month of January with the same type of stringent testing and standard quarantining you’d need to ensure everyone involved is negative. Over three weeks, every team would play nine or 10 games. Then perhaps they’d go back to campus for a bit and come back or go to another site to finish the schedule. The same kind of thing could be replicated in smaller increments for non-conference, round robin type tournaments with five or six teams.”
Are coaches grasping that this is the solution college basketball needs? It is beginning to look that way, even though no clear consensus has been reached:
“’We’ve discussed something like that as a league,’ another Power Five coach said.”
College basketball lost the 2020 NCAA Tournament, a devastating blow. However, college basketball has seen college football flounder in its attempt to have a season. College basketball can learn from football’s failures, for one thing. It also has more time to prepare for a possible start to a season in February or March of 2021.
Given the urgency among coaches and power brokers, the energy might exist in college basketball to act before it’s too late. That might be the biggest reason college basketball can pull off a bubble plan, whereas college football wasted multiple months and didn’t make needed adjustments.