NCAA president Mark Emmert confirmed the truth Sunday: Rudy Gobert's single positive test for the coronavirus changed the world.
Today was supposed to be Selection Sunday. Instead, Emmert was giving an interview to Mark Schlabach detailing the wild 24 hours when the NCAA first declared the tournament would be played without fans, then canceled.
On Wednesday, the NCAA said March Madness would be played without fans to slow the spread of the coronavirus. That night, Gobert tested positive for the virus, shutting down the NBA. The rest of American sports would follow on Thursday, as Division I conferences canceled their men's basketball tournaments one by one before the NCAA finally canceled.
Conference presidents Thursday said that their players were scared after Gobert's positive test. Emmert admitted the same on Sunday, calling it an "exclamation point." Before Gobert tested positive, Emmert thought banning fans would be enough. After the test, he admitted, "'It was like, 'Yeah, this is real.'"
Dan Gavitt, an NCAA vice president, also said that Gobert's positive test ultimately led to the tournament being canceled.
"I think the realization in the basketball community hit home and was very much felt on Thursday morning," after Gobert's test, Gavitt told ESPN. "The student-athletes, from what we were hearing and sensing, felt very vulnerable. Here was someone they would all like to be one day, playing in the NBA, who got infected and was quarantined with his teammates."
In the interview, Emmert made one strong point. Playing the games safely would require all players be tested for coronavirus, and given the extreme shortage of American coronavirus testing, that would actively hurt the ability to test people who might need it more.
"You're talking about a very limited resource, these test kits," Emmert said. "I'm not a public health official, but you've got this very scarce resource right now. Whether it should be scarce or not is another question, but it is scarce ... Should you take that scarce resource and test otherwise (healthy) 19-year-olds? Some of the public health officials were saying that's not a best use of this resource, and we were not going to have access to what we thought we needed."
How can any sport return until there's enough testing to test all the players? At the slow rate that testing capacity is increasing, that seems far away. The NCAA was the first organization to be confronted with that hard math and cancel instead of postponing or suspending, but it won't be the last.
