NEW YORK– The NCAA has canceled its men’s and women’s basketball tournaments Thursday because of the spread of coronavirus, putting a sudden finish to a season less than a month before champions could be crowned.
The unprecedented move comes a day after the NCAA announced the games that were scheduled to start next week would go on but be played in mostly empty arenas.
The plan thankfully was scrapped as every major American sports league from the NBA to Major League turned off the keys over concerns about the pandemic.
Thank goodness for common sense.
Once conferences began canceled league tournaments the optics of the NCAA holding a national tournament and putting unpaid student-athletes at serious medical risk in order to make money off TV looked worse than ever. No game is more important than life or death.
It would have been enough to fire NCAA president Mark Emmert.
The decision was based on the spread of the disease and the inability of the organization to ensure the event did not contribute to the spread of the pandemic. The idea of postponing the event seems unrealistic too. The NCAA also canceled championships in all spring sports, including hockey, baseball and lacrosse.
The end of the basketball season came about four hours after a frantic morning when conference tournaments around the country came to a sudden halt. Moments away from tipoff at some arenas, each Power 5 conference cancelled its remaining games.
The Big East cancelled after St. John’s and top-seed Creighton had played the first half of a quarterfinal game that started at 12 noon Thursday and was witnessed a limited audience.
Commissioner Val Ackerman pulled the plug after conferring with a contact in the Office of Emergency Management in the City of New York. Ackerman said she was told the city was planning to bring directives related to large gatherings as other cities and states have already done due to COVID-19 outbreak. One she obtained that information the game had already tipped off. Instead of stopping play, mid-half, she mobilized a call with league presidents and Ads and made the decision to cancel the rest of the tournament beginning at halftime.
