The craziness of the last few days finally culminated on Thursday with the inevitable announcement from the NCAA confirming what we all knew was coming – the 2020 spring season and subsequent NCAA Championships were officially cancelled. The coronavirus, which has been sweeping the planet over the last several months, finally started to ramp up in the United States and after the number of cases spiked up conferences and schools started to pull the plug on fans attending events and then ultimately calling everything off.
Was the quick decision to cancel the season too rash? Only time will tell but it was a move that the NCAA and each school/conference felt they had to make to try and slow the growth of the virus down.
I personally thought that each conference should have shut down for a 30-day period (similar to what is happening in Europe with soccer) and then reevaluated at that point with the decision made on facts rather than the panic that was sweeping the nation. If things had improved (decreasing number of new cases/death rate below what we see from the flu) then an abbreviated season could have been played out with conference tournaments and then the NCAAs. Of course if things hadn’t improved we would have been past the point of no return and the season would have to be scrapped but at least at that point we would have seen whether people who had contracted the virus had become virus-free or not.
Assuming the coronavirus fades It’ll be interesting to see how the NCAA handles eligibility for everyone and how things like next season’s championship site (does Stillwater get to do it next year), the Kick-Off Weekend draft (is it based off the most recent rankings), etc are handled. All we can do now is sit back and watch how it all plays out.
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