The idea that the 2020-21 college basketball season could be saved by using an NBA style "bubble" had seemed far-fetched.
Sure, both the NBA and the WNBA have so far successfully foiled the coronavirus by conducting regular-season basketball games with their teams locked inside isolation zones designed to keep players and coaches safe from COVID-19.
At least so far, the NBA "bubble" at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., and the WNBA bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., have proven effective in keeping players virus-free and teams playing.
Yet for reasons that include optics, tradition and expense, it has seemed all but impossible that you could use a system of bubbles to play college basketball.
Alas, necessity might be the mother of wildly unexpected innovation.
By the end of this past week, the college basketball hierarchy was awash with talk of how the "bubble concept" might just save the 2020-21 college hoops season from the corona-inspired chaos that has engulfed college football.
After the coronavirus KO'd last season's NCAA Tournament, NCAA President Mark Emmert is talking up a "bubble" as one way to ensure the 2021 tourney actually gets played.
"Starting with 64 teams (in a bubble) is tough," Emmert said in an interview on the NCAA's website. "Thirty-two, OK, maybe that's manageable. Sixteen, certainly manageable."
Kentucky Coach John Calipari told ESPN Radio's "The Intersection" that "the thing that's happened for us in basketball is the NBA and WNBA have shown a path for us to have a season."
Michigan State head man Tom Izzo told the Lansing State Journal that he, too, is intrigued by the bubble concept. Of particular local interest, Izzo said he could see an expanded Champions Classic in which annual participants Duke, Kansas, Kentucky and MSU are sequestered in place and play a full round-robin rather than the traditional early-season, one-night event.
Tom Izzo
Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo envisions the use of bubbles to protect players from the coronavirus and allow the 2020-21 NCAA college basketball season to be played. Nam Y. Huh AP
Suddenly, the idea of a college basketball bubble seems to be gathering mad momentum.
Before this past week, I would have said you could not put college hoops teams in a bubble for a similar reason you couldn't ask college football players to play if it was deemed to dangerous to bring general student bodies back to campuses during the pandemic.
The optics of it undermine everything college sports has long purported to be.
In putting college basketball players inside non-campus "bubbles," you would be treating them more like pro athletes than "normal" students.
Yet circumstances arising from on-campus efforts to contain the coronavirus might have given college sports authorities just enough wiggle room to justify in the court of public opinion a college hoops bubble.
In the battle against COVID-19, many major universities will not have students on campus from the Thanksgiving break until the spring semester starts.
That would seem to create a natural, on-campus bubble for basketball teams. It would also supply almost two months in which taking teams into off-campus bubbles would not involve missed class time.
Already, a Houston sporting event promoter, Rhossi Carron, is seeking to put together a 20-team bubble for December that would allow participants to play a full non-conference schedule during the elongated break between semesters.
Even once the spring semester convenes and classes are again in session, the fact many universities are relying on online classes and other virtual learning platforms rather than in-person instruction could provide a justification for using a bubble concept during conference play.
If all classes are virtual, what difference would it make if, say, a Kentucky player accessed online instruction from an Atlanta hotel room where the SEC had set up a basketball bubble or from his room in the Wildcat Coal Lodge?
Cost might be a problem. Cash-strapped athletics departments are already trying to offset the loss of revenue from last season's canceled men's NCAA Tournament. If the entire 2020 college football season ends up on ice, the financial strain on schools will be immense.
Paying to send basketball teams into off-campus bubbles would not be cheap.
For Title IX reasons, schools would presumably have to create bubbles of similar quality for their women's basketball teams if they planned to have them for the men's hoopsters, too.
On the other hand, not having an NCAA tourney for a second straight season would be financially catastrophic for the college sports industry.
So the idea of mimicking pro sports and setting up bubbles if that is what it will take to reap the multi-millions in television rights fees that come from the broadcast of an NCAA tourney suddenly does not look so extreme in college sports.
Asked on the NCAA's own website about the possibility of holding the 2020 NCAA Tournament via a series of bubbles, Emmert said "you've got to figure out those logistics. There's doubtlessly ways to make (a bubble) work."
You know what they say: Desperate times call for desperate measures.
