Duke and Kansas Announce They Will Not Compete in NCAA Tourney (If it Happens)
Duke and Kansas have both cancelled all athletic activities for the forseeable future and will not be participating the NCAA Tourney if it does still happen.
I suspect more schools will follow and this will act as an informal cancellation of the tourney until the NCAA inevitably announces it soon.
Normally I would say fuck Duke and a tournament without them would be great, but I think they have the right idea here. Kansas shouldn't have been allowed to play in the tourney this year even before all this happened if the NCAA actually did their jobs.
Kansas will also announce this is a self imposed sanction and that all is cool now
And Coach K will just say that Duke would have won it anyway and go ahead and hang another banner at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Much to the delight of Dick Vitale.
My Duke friends weren't liking their chances in the tournament anyway. Methinks this is similar to Coach K figuratively cancelling their season for his "back surgery" a few years ago.
And then Coach K dumped the failure on poor Jeff Caple.
What a scumbag.
Actually Self is now trying to backtrack it saying they haven’t officially decided anything.
Sad that schools are taking this step before the NCAA just puts a stop to it. Literally everyone else is on this before the NCAA and it's a very bad look.
If you’re familiar with the kind of individual Mark Emertt is, you’ll see that this is just par for the course for him.
Give credit where credit is due. Emmert was the first one to make a decision that would cost a lot of money due to coronavirus, not having fans at the tournament.
There is no benefit to cancelling the tournament today. Fans know they can't go to the games, they aren't going to be booking flights, hotels, etc. They can still have a bracket reveal on Sunday and make the call on Tuesday/Wednesday before teams fly out.
Emmert may be an idiot when it comes to many other thing, but so far he has handled this well.
Can’t they just test the players ? quarantine then sick ones.
There are a lot more people involved in running the NCAA tournament than just the players. It's not like 30 college kids can just show up to an empty gym and play basketball and then shoot an email afterward saying who won.
PCR is very specific but not sensitive, aka false negatives are not uncommon.
The money the NCAA takes in from fan attendance is a pittance compared to the revenue they get from TV and ad deals.
It was a half ass measure to try and say they’d still do it, but without the fans, that was done strictly as a money grab without any concern for the athletes. Which has been Emertt’s MO since the day he took over.
He thought he could get away with because he wasn’t expecting the professional leagues to say they were totally stop playing within 24 hours of the NCAA’s announcement.
Now he’s just trying to save face before calling the whole thing off like he should have done in the first place.
Emmert was a clueless jackass at the University of Washington when I lived in Seattle. He has not improved with age.
Professional golf is worse, they continue on. NASCAR too.
Just be the last team to announce you're abstaining and BOOM! Defacto championship!
Great - we can add that to our 2013 trophy...
What’s North Carolina’s plan?
UNC will stage a fake tournament and give everyone a championship they didn't have to play for.
Utah State, national champion?
UM should hold out until the end and be the default champion.
Man, I sure hope urologists will honor their March Madness "Snip and Save" deals.
My sons college in Illinois is cancelling his baseball season and likely the rest of the semester. No online classes available. Talk about a kick in the nuts. He was positioned to get out of the juco he attends and go power 5 next yr.
No online classes available? They are just outright cancelling all the classes? That's weird. The university where I teach is heading into Spring Break and announced classes might meet again in 3 weeks. In the meantime, we are supposed to convert our classes to online. Most already have a healthy dose of online content, but it will be quite a challenge in certain courses. So, physical classes and activities are cancelled for the foreseeable future, but the classes are to continue online. Almost every other university I have heard about is doing something similar.
Wondering what happens with classes that usually have labs, like Physics and Chemistry for example. They just going to skip that part?
Good luck in asking or demanding for a partial tuition refund. I would.
I'll tell you, if the tournament does end up getting canceled, which seems very likely, there's one particular team I'll be heartbroken for: Rutgers.
This would have been their first tourney in 29 years....Man, I feel for the players and the fans. That's just brutal.
Penn St.
Dayton (!) - a legit FF team this year.
I'd definitely add to your list, with its exceptional first choice.
Honestly I think this might be why they announce a bracket and then cancel it.
Dayton might get to claim a 1 seed. Rutgers can say they made the tournament. Regular season conference winners can say they made it. Etc.
I feel for Dayton but considering their best wins are like St marys and St Johns I don't think they had very great chances at a Final Four unless they landed in a favorable region
I think I'm still a few years (decades) away from feeling sorry for anything Penn St. related.
Curses! Double post!
Rooting against Duke is at least half the point of holding the tournament.
Last school to cancel wins the national title!
This is a really bad look for the NCAA. Professional leagues where players are actually getting paid are doing the smart thing and meanwhile they are dragging their heels when it comes to amateur athletes. Now it's left up to individual schools trying to force their hand.
Official word on the tournament likely to come tomorrow per what I just saw reported. But at this point the outcome seems obvious.
Sucks, but smart. The right thing to do.
Agreed... glad they waited to evaluate instead of knee jerk reactions.
Slow and steady wins the race.
The writing is on the wall: the NCAA tournament is not going to happen.
Big Dance all but dead. To cancel ALL athletic activities is eye opening. That means ALL spring sports could be cancelled at Michigan and across the B1G conference, then all of the NCAA.
This is like a wild fire out of control.
Once again, we can all be thankful for the University of Kansas taking the lead on the moral compass.
Kansas only doing it because they know if the tourney is cancelled then since theyre #1 odds are they would be declared champions by default if the NCAA goes that route
4D chess
So I finally was going to be able to stay home and watch every single game during March Madness without having to have a vasectomy...and now that has gone to hell as well. Crap.
How many "vasectomies" have you had?
They just kept taking a little bit more each year...
Two - one side at a time.
They might be able to pull off the tournament if they could delay it a full month or so. But I can't see that happening. And even that might not be enough.
Yeah... no.... I doubt it, schools just shut down, kids are home. This is going to be a 'brave new world' when this is all said and done. I'm not being freakishly apocalyptic about it, just saying that schools across the USA just SHUT DOWN... how do you officially re-open, professors and residencies are all over the place, curriculum is being solidified for online courses etc.
So the prior doesn't have much to do with the athletes, but in a few minor ways it does. These kids still have to take courses and get educations... but we have a student body that's trying to do the same, and I'm guessing many courses are going to have to be retaken, or some sort of makeups etc. (think about labs etc.) Certainly these are large institutions that can multi-task but to completely reschedule would be an incredible undertaking