The idea that the 2020-21 college basketball season could be saved by using an NBA style “bubble” had seemed far-fetched.
Sure, both the NBA and the WNBA have so far successfully foiled the coronavirus by conducting regular-season basketball games with their teams locked inside isolation zones designed to keep players and coaches safe from COVID-19.
At least so far, the NBA “bubble” at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and the WNBA bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., have proven effective in keeping players virus-free and teams playing.
Yet for reasons that include optics, tradition and expense, it has seemed all but impossible that you could use a system of bubbles to play college basketball.
Alas, necessity might be the mother of wildly unexpected innovation.
By the end of this past week, the college basketball hierarchy was awash with talk of how the “bubble concept” might just save the 2020-21 college hoops season from the corona-inspired chaos that has engulfed college football.
After the coronavirus KO’d last season’s NCAA Tournament, NCAA President Mark Emmert is talking up a “bubble” as one way to ensure the 2021 tourney actually gets played.
“Starting with 64 teams (in a bubble) is tough,” Emmert said in an interview on the NCAA’s website. “Thirty-two, OK, maybe that’s manageable. Sixteen, certainly manageable.”
Kentucky Coach John Calipari told ESPN Radio’s “The Intersection” that “the thing that’s happened for us in basketball is the NBA and WNBA have shown a path for us to have a season.”
Michigan State head man Tom Izzo told the Lansing State Journal that he, too, is intrigued by the bubble concept. Of particular local interest, Izzo said he could see an expanded Champions Classic in which annual participants Duke, Kansas, Kentucky and MSU are sequestered in place and play a full round-robin rather than the traditional early-season, one-night event.
Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo envisions the use of bubbles to protect players from the coronavirus and allow the 2020-21 NCAA college basketball season to be played. Nam Y. Huh AP
Suddenly, the idea of a college basketball bubble seems to be gathering mad momentum.
Before this past week, I would have said you could not put college hoops teams in a bubble for a similar reason you couldn’t ask college football players to play if it was deemed to dangerous to bring general student bodies back to campuses during the pandemic.
The optics of it undermine everything college sports has long purported to be.
In putting college basketball players inside non-campus “bubbles,” you would be treating them more like pro athletes than “normal” students.
Yet circumstances arising from on-campus efforts to contain the coronavirus might have given college sports authorities just enough wiggle room to justify in the court of public opinion a college hoops bubble.
