I don't understand why they aren't doing mini-bubbles. In other words, have Gardner Webb and Coppin State come to campus one or two weeks ago to get fully on Duke's Covid protocols. They can practice at Duke's facilities and use whatever education facilities they needed to do their remote learning, and they could play an additional game against each other. Michigan State is playing Notre Dame on Saturday. Seems like it would have been logical to do a bubble of Duke, Michigan State, and Notre Dame in Durham so that we could get the Champions Classic in and knock out our scheduled ACC home game with Notre Dame.
I understand it's probably way more complicated than that but if they were going to do a shortened season anyways might as well just figure out how to do mini-bubbles that rotate every 2-4 weeks. I realize that's the idea behind these multi-team events like the Mako Duke Classic, etc, so clearly it can be done, it just needed to be done more. But that would require teams to go way outside their normal scheduling practices, maybe even require teams to not play so many garbage games against mid and low majors, and all working together and compromising.
That would have only been functional (and I'm using that term loosely) for the opening weekend. After that, teams' schedules deviate too much to make a bubble work. Especially not with a 1-2 week lead-in time for bubbling.
Unless you drastically cut down on the number of games (both in and out of conference), it's just not feasible.
Yea, I hate to be pessimistic but I agree with you here. Assuming the virus continues to spread widely and aggressively throughout almost the entire country for the next four to eight weeks (or longer), we'll see (at best) a very disjointed college basketball season. I think it is almost inevitable that there will be positive Covid tests on almost every college team (and let's hope Duke can avoid that!) and that with most college and team protocols in place, games will have to be cancelled or postponed right and left. I really don't see any way that a "normal" season occurs. It would not surprise me in the least to see many schools just cancel the entire season (like the Ivy League) and maybe this is the wisest course of action (from the standpoint of the health of the players, coaches, staff, etc.).
I did the same thing...cancelled my DISH Network satellite contract last year when we finally got high speed fiber optic installed in our small town and switched over to streaming YouTube TV, when it was $40 per month (compared to about $125 per month for DISH); then YouTube raised the price to $49/month and now up to $65/month and I expect it will go higher). But even with YouTube TV, there are a lot of channels I never watch and don't want to pay for (like cable TV). When are we going to have a true "menu of choices" of channels from which we can pick and choose which stations we want and then pay for that skinny bundle?
The most sensible approach would have been to make it full-on "Spring" sport: delaying the start until March, playing conference-only, and then having the tournament in May.
As is, I too have trouble seeing any realistic way we get through the season. Games are very likely to get postponed/cancelled left and right, especially in January as folks come back from break.
Of course it's a moot point now, given the overall premise of this post and its obvious assumption coming to pass, but I just want to point out that Gardner Webb University is located in Boiling Springs, NC with a population under 5,000ppl. It is objectively NOT in a large city, even by NC's modest standard. Oddly, I was born there in the flagship hospital, which had about eight beds in the L&D "wing" of the facility.
Seems like, wise or not, leagues are bending over backward to ensure that the start of the 2021 season is not impacted by this season. To that end, I wonder if they decided to live with however many games they could get in, create a bubble environment for the tourney to acquire the revenue, and then hope things get back to normal for 2021.
Delaying to spring - hey, no guarantee this thing won't be spreading then as well. March and April were um, not great this year, after all. Why not give yourself more time to accomplish the exact same thing? Can always add a delay later on down the road, yeah? (Just thinking from their perspective, not necessarily arguing in favor of anything).
i imagine that despite "officially" only necessary workers will start getting vaccines in the middle of december...we'll find out that SOMEHOW the basketball team ended up high up on the list. Of course, that will never be official policy...sort of like how despite a scarcity of tests earlier in the year, somehow they were able to test athletes multiple times a week. Maybe not at duke, but I guarantee it will happen somewhere.
April 1
Sure, but it's gotta happen everywhere in order to make a spring season more likely than a November - April season that still retains flexibility to get delay the tourney.
But yes, it's been interesting how much better the testing and tracing is for these athletes and how quickly they get their results back compared to the rest of us.
to be fair, anyone at duke can get tests now...and duke HAS largely been on the forefront of test availability (mostly because they want the data for research)...and I think they know with how strict our protocols are, it seems the other teams have been far bigger risks...which has played out in both football and bball.
April 1
Oh yeah, Duke's been a model for how to handle it. The NCAA's really up against it because, while some programs like Duke are keeping things really tight, there's a ton of variance across hundreds of D1 programs (for hoops). A decentralized body will find it hard to manage something like this across all its member teams. Hoping the ACC protocols will give a smaller, more common ground that could increase the likelihood for a successful season. We'll see.
I posted this on another thread but it also seems relevant here.
https://seminoles.com/florida-state-...ener-canceled/