Written by: Jordan Griffitt
“Due to COVID concerns” seems to be the most used term of the year 2020. It is also a term that has been used many times in the early days of the college basketball season, cancelling numerous games already.
There have been so many cancellations that they aren’t worth listing but those cancellations create a big gap that needs to be filled.
The college basketball season started just weeks ago but has already hit several roadblocks like many other sports but for basketball the difference is March Madness and conference tournaments.
Many of these teams will have at least a few cancelled games throughout the year and determining who can get into these tournaments is going to be much more difficult. Previously, you could judge all of the teams on an even playing field but that’s not the case this season. How is the committee supposed to judge a team that has a similar winning percentage but six less games?
This is also going to affect conference tournament seeding and how these teams play each other in order to get to the dance.
I can only imagine that this is going to hurt the mid-major’s rather than the power five conferences. The chances are that the smaller schools have more willingness to cancel games because they don’t have the amount of money coming in from the TV games that teams like Duke or Kansas have. That in turn, will leave the smaller schools with less wins or games played and that almost kills their chances of getting a non-conference tournament bid. When the committee sits down and takes a look at all of these teams for consideration they will favor the power five team who has slightly less wins over a mid-major with more wins. If there is a situation where the mid-major has slightly less wins they will certainly not get into the national tournament over the bigger market team although the mid-major might be the better team but has fewer opportunities to show it.
So far, the biggest issue is not that the games are being cancelled but that the NCAA hasn’t offered a solution to the problem at hand. The public has not been notified of the solution for the problem which makes me think that there isn’t one. Until then, we will just wait and cross our fingers and hope that these mid-major teams will get fair council in March.
