Baylor-Gonzaga getting cancelled is the COVID process working
Baylor-Gonzaga getting cancelled is the COVID process working
It's a mess and we don't really have a plan, but Saturday was an example of the process actually working, not a black eye on college basketball.
This is always how the season was going to play out.
If you were expecting otherwise, I’m not really sure how.
Or why.
Maybe you need to dig your head out of the sand.
Entering Saturday, a little more than 20 percent of the games that were scheduled to be played during the first 11 days of the college basketball season were either cancelled or postponed. One of those games that was cancelled would have featured a pair of top three teams in Baylor and Villanova had both advanced to the final of the … well, whatever-the-hell event they were supposed to play in Bubbleville.
So it really should come as no surprise that we also happened to lose — hopefully just to a postponement — No. 1 Gonzaga vs. No. 2 Baylor, a possible national title game preview and what assuredly would have been the game of the season in college basketball this year.
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After the wretch that we were forced to watch during the Champions Classic, both Gonzaga and Baylor put in sterling performances in wins over No. 11 West Virginia and No. 5 Illinois, respectively. The anticipation was as palpable as you can get in the COVID-era. And 85 minutes before we were set to tip-off, Gonzaga and Baylor sent out a joint statement announcing that the game had been called off due to two positive tests within the Gonzaga program. One was a player that did not play against West Virginia on Wednesday. One was a staff member.
Like Thor’s Hammer straight to the nuts.
(If there’s a silver lining, that freed up time to finish getting my Christmas lights hung and fixing the hole in my ceiling that showed up because my children somehow found a way to make the bathtub upstairs leak into, and through, the space above my kitchen. That was much more fun than that game would have been. I’m not at all being sarcastic.)
There’s no way around it: This. Fucking. Sucks.
But we knew things like this were going to happen. We are playing sports in the middle of a pandemic. We are flying college kids around the country to play basketball games IN THE MIDDLE.
OF.
A PANDEMIC.
I’ve made my peace with that. Cognitive dissonance and all. I wrote about that here. If you have the urge to say here, “But Rob, why are we even playing at all?” please read this first. I answer your question.
The more important point to make here is that there are ways to try and work around this happening in the future, to try and prevent another situation where the biggest game of the day — or the week, or the season, or in the NCAA tournament — gets shut down less than two hours before tip-off. Those involve bubbles. Not Bubbleville. Not whatever we had going on in Indianapolis. Real, honest-to-goodness bubbles, where players enter, quarantine and get cut off from the outside world. There’s a reason the NBA’s restart is the only one that went off without any interruption in any sport on the planet, and why there’s very little chance that next season is going to go anywhere near as smoothly.
But creating bubbles is difficult. They are expensive. The mental stress that gets put on these kids living in isolation for however many months is borderline criminal considering, you know, they’re unpaid amateur athletes and all that.
(That said, it’s not like living in isolation on a college campus is any better. Listen to the stories of the players currently in quarantine. It’s hard. It’s really, really hard.)
There are certainly ways that this entire process could be done better, but asking those things to happen in a Substack is very different than being in charge of creating, and funding, and running them in the real world. That’s just the truth.
So with that in mind, let me just say this: What happened with Baylor and Gonzaga today was not some shit show. It was not a bad look for the sport. It was not some black eye.
When Gonzaga played Auburn the same day that a team member tested positive for the virus, that was a black eye. When the people in charge with making the decision to play saw this video of No. 0 Julian Strawther, who was the player that tested positive, celebrating a win over Kansas with his team like this …
… the night before he tested positive?
That was a black eye.
That was an embarrassment.
That was a game that never should have been played. Call me a cynic, but I’d be willing to bet you any amount of money you’d like that Gonzaga getting fast and loose with positive tests in Fort Myers had quite a bit to do with their positive tests in Indianapolis.
But here’s the thing: I don’t even fully blame Mark Few for that. He should know better (should he though?), but he’s also a basketball coach. Gonzaga and Auburn followed the COVID protocols that were put in place by tournament organizers and the health department in Florida. They said quarantine the kid that tested positive, quarantine his close contacts — which, frankly, was the entire team, but whatever — and go play.
It’s dumb and it’s irresponsible but if the doctors are telling Few and Bruce Pearl it’s safe, who are they to argue? Do you think those coaches are going to listen to a doctor telling them how to defend a pick-and-roll? Would a lawyer take legal advice from me?
What happened in Indianapolis on Saturday was that the medical professionals shut everything down. It was the Indiana health department that put a stop to the game. The players wanted to play, and I would have wanted to, too, if I was them. The coaches wanted to play, and I don’t blame them for that at all. The people that are in charge with understanding this virus did not want them to play.
And they listened!
Everyone listened!
"We're disappointed to not be able to play one of the most-anticipated games of the season, but we are following the advice of public health officials," read a joint statement attributed to Gonzaga coach Mark Few and Baylor coach Scott Drew. "When we decided to play during a pandemic, our priorities were protecting the health and safety of student-athletes and following public health guidelines, and we're proud of how both programs have held true to those promises. There are much greater issues in this world than not being able to play a basketball game, so we're going to continue praying for everyone who has been affected by this pandemic."
That’s the part that matters here.
The process worked.
This is the way that it should go around the country. Prepare as if we’re going to play, as if the season is going to go on. When positive tests pop up, shut things down, cancel what needs to be cancelled, get healthy and go on to the next game, or the next practice, or the next whatever, whenever that time comes.
Welcome to 2020.
There is no consistency across the sport, which is going to be a nightmare. It’s why the bubble in Orlando went belly up. The lack of centralized NCAA leadership across the 32 college basketball leagues has always been a problem, a problem that is now exacerbated by the current conditions we are living in. We need a college basketball commissioner right now. That position doesn’t exist. It goes conference by conference until we get to the NCAA tournament. The stupidity of the system is baffling, although hardly surprising.
But the larger point is, in Indianapolis today, the system worked the way that it is supposed to work.
And despite the two programs making the trek to Indiana, and despite all of the network television resources that were invested to turn the game into a TV show, and despite the money that was spent on renting out Bankers Life Fieldhouse, it was cancelled.
85 minutes before tip.
It really, really fucking sucks.
But it’s proof that, at least in some places, safety protocols take priority.
And that, to me, is evidence of the process working.