It's only been eight months since Florida State was pulled off the Greensboro Coliseum floor, only to return to be handed the ACC trophy in the last act of a season cut short. Only eight months.
The ACC tournament was canceled, like everything else, amid fears of a single positive COVID test. Starting Wednesday, we'll plunge ahead with the next basketball season despite a deluge of them, with Duke's first game already crossed off the schedule. The circumstances and our perspectives have changed in the interim. We've gone from fearing a pandemic to acclimatizing to life within one, with everything that comes with that.
And if finishing the last basketball season was impossible, it's going to be next to impossible to finish this one. It's one thing to try to play one football game a week, and even that's been difficult. The same coronavirus conditions that have forced the postponement, rescheduling or cancellation of 20% of the ACC football schedule have the potential to knock out two or three basketball games a week, not to mention the at-risk nature of an older group of coaches.
The margin for error is slimmer in basketball, too. A college football team may have 20 players in quarantine and not miss a beat, but a basketball team that loses the wrong three players is in big trouble. The same is true of officials; a full college crew might be able to sub in a couple high school officials at the last minute without anyone noticing — it's happened! — but college basketball only starts with three. Referees have been told to brush up on their two-man mechanics.
Even with the hard-earned experience of football, basketball hasn't exactly been able to put itself in the best position nationally. More than three dozen teams have shut down or pulled out of tournaments and a handful of ACC nonconference games have already been rescheduled or wiped out. Duke was supposed to open with Gardner-Webb on Wednesday only for the Bulldogs to run into a positive test. Two of the Blue Devils' next three games — against Coppin State and Bellarmine — are very much at risk. N.C. Central, meanwhile, fresh off a program shutdown because of a positive test, is on its way to Iowa.
That's just the way it's going to be, just as it has been in football. The schedule is merely a guideline, a hopeful aspiration. This weekend saw two ACC schools get in a public spat over the interpretation of COVID protocols and guidelines — Clemson, which apparently wanted the National Guard to force Florida State to play at bayonet-point, is still whining about it — while Temple and East Carolina sat around at kickoff waiting for one player's last-second emergency test results to come back.
On the plus side, we're all used to this by now. If UCLA and Cal can schedule an impromptu football game on two days' notice, certainly basketball teams can show the same kind of flexibility. Odds are high that one of the Triangle schools will, at some point, end up getting on a bus to Clemson or Virginia or Virginia Tech with very little notice to play a game that wasn't originally on the schedule. Such accommodations will no doubt become the routine.
While the fraction of the season that's actually played as planned remains anyone's guess, there's still one big potential switch to come.
Greensboro pitched the ACC on the possibility of building a bubble to play conference games, using the coliseum, the annex and practice courts set up in the ballroom of the usual headquarters hotel — the Four Seasons Sheraton, another Four Seasons that's not a Four Seasons Hotel, in keeping with the zeitgeist — but the ACC in the end decided it was too costly and awkward, as did the rest of college basketball.
Don't be surprised if those plans are revived at some point for the ACC tournament, which is scheduled for Washington this March. The women's tournament, too. If there are not going to be fans in Washington, and who can say at this point, why not play it in a ready-made bubble? That's not currently the plan, but Greensboro's playbook is still sitting there, ready for use if needed.
It's exactly the kind of unexpected diversion this season will have to excess, and what a twist it would be for this strange season to finish up on the same floor where the last one ended so abruptly.
