Sunday Storylines: Auburn self-immolates and Scott Drew's got the Rona
Let's talk about what happened on Sunday.
Bruce Pearl is doing the smart thing.
He’s coming off of a season where he lost all five starters. That came a year after his led the Tigers to the Final Four and promptly lost three of his five starters, two of whom left for the NBA Draft with eligibility remaining. His leading returning scorer averaged less than five points.
Whether or not he had his program self-impose a postseason ban for the 2021 NCAA Tournament, this team was not going to be dancing.
Which is why it makes total sense for the program to fall on their sword this year.
Pearl is staring down the barrel of a rebuilding year. He’s doing so in the middle of a pandemic that is going to produce the strangest college basketball season in the history of the sport, a season that the NCAA has already decided they will give back to the players. The players on his roster are not going to lose a year of eligibility for the 2020-21 season.
This season is, by any reasonable definition, a free-roll, a chance for Pearl to figure out what works with these players so that when Jabari Smith, a top five prospect in the Class of 2021, enrolls next fall, he’ll have a supporting cast that is good enough to push Auburn back to the top of the SEC.
If you’re going to cost yourself a postseason, it might as well be the one you probably wouldn’t make even if it doesn’t get cancelled by a pandemic that is raging out of control before the entire country celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas en masse.
Yeah.
I don’t blame Pearl for making what is, by all accounts, an obvious decision.
And, frankly, I don’t feel as bad for the Auburn players as I did for the Syracuse players when the Orange self-imposed a postseason in 2015, or when SMU and Louisville self-imposed bans on their 2016 postseasons. All of these guys committed to Auburn knowing that Chuck Person had been accused of accepting bribes to steer athletes under his influence to a specific financial advisor. They knew that he had given a good chunk of that money to those players. They knew there was a possibility this would happen. NCAA rules suck — and the way the NCAA is going to punish the people involved in these cases is total and complete horseshit, as evidenced by Oklahoma State — but we know all of this.
We knew all of it when these guys decided to go to Auburn.
What we didn’t know, however, was that the world was going to be shutdown by a pandemic that cost us the 2020 NCAA Tournament and has forced these athletes to have to live in some level of isolation for the last eight months.* The mental toll that this has taken on the young people in America won’t truly be known for years, and given that context, it seems incredibly unfair that Auburn would make the decision to take away that dream.
The entire point of college basketball is that it very much is open to anyone to win. All you need to do to get to the NCAA tournament is play your best basketball for one weekend in March. All you need to do to win the NCAA tournament is play your best basketball for six straight games after that. In 2011, UConn was the No. 9-seed and played the noon-tip on the Tuesday of the Big East tournament in MSG. They would go on to win 11 straight games after that, taking home the Big East and NCAA tournament titles.
This dream is why college basketball is so magical.
And taking that away from the kids under your tutelage while they are dealing with what society is dealing
*(Now, if I’m being totally transparent, I’m not entirely sure just how isolated Auburn has been. That area of the country has not taken precautions at the same level as New Jersey, where I live, as evidenced by this video taken from Isaac Okoro’s draft party by current Auburn freshman Sharife Cooper. That’s a lot of people inside. There aren’t many masks to be found. Yikes.)
The other news that popped up on Sunday evening was that Scott Drew, the head coach of the Baylor Bears, has tested positive for COVID-19.
He tested positive on Friday. No one else in the Baylor program tested positive on Friday, or on Sunday. According to David Kaye, the program’s SID, Baylor plans on testing the entire traveling party before their flight on Monday, on Tuesday and before they are scheduled to play Arizona State on Wednesday.
Now, it looks like that game against Arizona State isn’t going to happen.
The Sun Devils are expected to back out of the matchup, and there were rumblings on Wednesday night that Villanova, who was on track to play Baylor in the title game of the Empire Classic at Mohegan Sun, would pull out of the event as well.
This is another incredibly kick straight to the dick of college basketball’s non-conference season. We already lost the Orlando bubble due to the differing protocols between conferences around the country. We already lost Virginia’s showdown with Florida from Bubbleville. Getting a chance to see Baylor and Villanova — who may be the two-best teams in college basketball — face off was going to be the highlights of Thanksgiving for us college hoop scribes that are following CDC guidelines and shutting down the Turkey Day festivities.
And to be clear, I don’t blame Arizona State or Villanova for backing out if that is the way that this eventually goes.
I would do the exact same thing if I was Bobby Hurley or Jay Wright. I’m not risking my season by trusting another program to properly contact trace.
But I do want to be clear in saying that it is going to be near-impossible to have any kind of coherent college basketball season if we are going to be canceling games when one team has one positive before seeing everyone in the program test negative five times in the next five days.
So we need to prepare ourselves for this.
Since bubbles appear to be a non-starter in college basketball, we either need to accept that there are going to be games played when a program had a recent positive test, or resign ourselves to seeing something a fraction of the college hoops we expected.
That’s reality at this point.
I was a little more optimistic than Rob, hoping Bruce Pearl could squeak this team onto the right side of the bubble. However, it makes total sense to take the hit this year. My hope is that this will appease the capricious NCAA gods. 🤞🏼