NC State’s bubble bursts as college basketball stumbles through a season of COVID
If it wasn’t already apparent just how difficult it’s going to be to proceed through this college basketball season, let alone complete it, Saturday saw N.C. State kicked out of “Bubbleville” and its game with UConn canceled.
The Wolfpack became the latest ACC team to shut down, joining Wake Forest and Louisville in various stages of hoopus interruptus. At least those teams can stay home; Stanford is marooned in Chapel Hill, unable to return to Palo Alto after playing in the Maui Invitational in Asheville. And the most anticipated nonconference game of the entire season, a potential Final Four preview, was postponed as well Saturday when Gonzaga and Baylor pulled the plug.
The ACC basketball tournament, once scheduled for Washington, already packed its bags for Greensboro last week. And even teams that aren’t dealing with COVID-19 are facing the consequences. Notre Dame had two games canceled this week it was ready to play.
No one ever expected this to be easy, but it’s turning out to be far harder than anyone could have foreseen. A football program may be able to practice in pods, but a basketball team cannot. Football games have been played without quarterbacks, without long snappers, without half the coaching staff. One positive test by a player can put half or all of the rest of the team into quarantine, although Syracuse -- which already had to pause for two weeks ahead of its opener -- has credited wearable contact-tracing technology for its ability to keep playing after a walk-on tested positive.
It was always going to be harder in basketball than football, and when you’ve got three times as many teams trying to play three times as many games with three times the travel -- the national championship may come down not to talent or skill or coaching but perseverance.
Last team standing wins.
In N.C. State’s case, it’s all the more infuriating because the Wolfpack genuinely believed it was doing everything right. At the Mohegan Sun casino, the team was escorted through back hallways, kept in designated areas, sequestered from everyone. The entire travel party tested negative before leaving for Connecticut and again while there. The team was even able to go up to Connecticut early and add a game against UMass-Lowell on Thursday. Then, on Friday, bam. One positive. Shut down.
This isn’t the first time N.C. State had a basketball bubble burst, although this time it’s only tangentially related to the Wolfpack’s nonconference schedule. N.C. State is scheduled to play Michigan in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge on Wednesday and Florida Atlantic next Saturday; both of those games are now very much in doubt. Louisville is next after that, but the Cardinals are currently paused as well.
That’s just the way of the world at the moment. Baylor and Gonzaga, at the moment clearly the two best teams in the country and perhaps the two best by far, were supposed to play Saturday in Indianapolis, where they both played Wednesday. But Gonzaga had one player and one staff member test positive, and the schools mutually agreed to try to play later in the season.
While the Zags headed back to Washington, Stanford practiced at the Smith Center again on Saturday, the Cardinal’s temporary home away from home. Because COVID-related restrictions in Santa Clara County would prevent Stanford from practicing if it had returned to California after playing a tournament scheduled for Hawaii in North Carolina, Stanford set up in Chapel Hill. It’s a familiar locale to head coach Jerod Haase, a former Roy Williams assistant at UNC.
The Cardinal hoped to add a few games against teams here. As of Saturday morning, Stanford had yet to officially find an opponent with room on its schedule and its season unpaused, although there was at least one report North Carolina A&T might have an opening.
Before the season even started, Rick Pitino -- Iona coach Rick Pitino, strange as that may sound -- suggested pushing the season back to the spring, when the combination of a potential vaccine and weather-related case declines might make for a more hospitable environment. That wasn’t something anyone really wanted to discuss then. The NCAA should take another look now. There’s nothing wrong with May Madness.
At the very least, someone -- the NCAA, the ACC, anyone -- should draw a line in the sand. How many games lost, how many programs paused, is too many? Right now, there’s no answer to that question. Maybe there should be.
This story was originally published December 5, 2020 at 2:10 PM with the headline "NC State’s bubble bursts as college basketball stumbles through a season of COVID."
