It’s actually surprising something like this hasn’t happened before. We’ve asked so much of college football and basketball students this season, to dispense with any semblance of a normal college experience, to live in isolation sometimes on empty campuses, it was inevitable the seams would fray at some point.
In this case, college basketball’s biggest rivalry proved to be the breaking point. After video surfaced of North Carolina’s Armando Bacot and Day’Ron Sharpe celebrating maskless after Saturday night’s win at Duke, Monday night’s game against Miami was postponed after the two schools “mutually concluded the game could not go forward today” according to the ACC, nine words doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
Bacot and Sharpe weren’t any different than the hundred of their classmates who unwisely stormed Franklin Street in the aftermath, prompting the university to offer professors the option of teaching online for two weeks, but if we needed yet another reminder that college athletes are not merely regular students, this was it.
In this case, acting like regular students — boneheaded as it may have been — brought North Carolina’s basketball season to a halt.
The UNC-Miami game became the 28th ACC game to be postponed for COVID reasons, although reasonable people can disagree on that number because one of them has been postponed twice. These are the statistical debates of the season.
Roughly a quarter of the season has been disrupted so far, with three of the 28 successfully rescheduled and played among the 75 other games completed, not counting all the nonconference games lost to the winds.
But Monday’s game was the first to be postponed in the absence of positive tests or contact tracing, strictly out of precaution — or stupidity, you might even say. Unwise exuberance, to be more kind.
Things have generally moved along. Not always smoothly, but the basketball train has continued to rumble down the tracks only slightly behind schedule. The games are played, for the most part. Television inventory is produced.
But the longer we ask these players to put their lives aside and lead these strange sequestered existences, the more likely we are to see more of this. It happened over the summer with football players — LSU players got their program paused in June after visiting a Baton Rouge bar — but everyone seemed to learn their lesson.
Players and coaches alike came to understand the deal, that if they didn’t play by these new and draconian rules, one slip-up could shut everything down.
Presumably, Bacot and Sharpe aren’t the first to push the envelope but they are the first in the ACC to get caught, which carries with it its own stamp of ignominy.
They screwed up. They violated the coronavirus compact. In one moment, after the biggest victory of their season, they burst the basketball bubble.
We’re supposed to be angry at them, the way we are angry at anyone who puts their own selfish entertainment ahead of the common good at this odd moment in time. But we’re also asking so much of these athletes for our own selfish entertainment. Do we — fans, the schools, the media, ESPN, the ACC, the NCAA, and so on — really have any standing to criticize?
