KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Quick, name a time a college sports program that’s crammed more forms of rotten news into one week than Kansas.
KU, in a week, has:
— Put its football coach on administrative leave after sexual harassment allegations surfaced from his previous job
— Opted to “mutually part ways” with said football coach (KU will end up paying Les Miles $2.5 million per win)
— Allowed its athletic director to hold a news conference ostensibly to instill public confidence
— Allowed said AD to “step down” after said news conference turned into a tire fire
— Lost its best basketball player for the conference tournament because of COVID-19 protocols
— Then lost an entire team for said conference tournament because of three positive COVID-19 test results
Mercy. At least they had some dunks in the win over Oklahoma?
In a Friday news release, Kansas men’s basketball coach Bill Self said, in part: “I look forward to preparing my team in probably a unique way for next week’s NCAA Tournament.”
Let’s do the basketball implications first. KU’s participation in the NCAA Tournament is tenuous. Self told beat reporters that KU had one player test positive on Friday, on top of the other two being held out because of COVID-19 protocols. Self also said the team, minus those three players, still planned to travel to Indianapolis for the tournament Monday.
NCAA Tournament protocols require a negative test and no symptoms 11 days after the first positive test or symptoms appeared. For the player who tested positive Friday, assuming no prior symptoms, he would be eligible to return if he’s symptom-free on March 23.
Players wear tracing bracelets, and anyone within six feet of the player with the positive result for a total of 15 minutes over a 24-hour period can return only after seven consecutive days of negative tests.
The NCAA Tournament’s first-round games will be played next Friday and Saturday in Indianapolis, with the second round scheduled for Sunday, March 21 and Monday, March 22.
That means the player with Friday’s positive result could not play until at least the Sweet 16. Any teammate pulled for contact tracing would be eligible to play next week with seven straight days of negative results.
All of this comes after David McCormack and Tristan Enaruna sat out KU’s Big 12 quarterfinal game Thursday night because of COVID-19 protocols.
This is a major disruption for a team that had found its groove after a midseason slump. Kansas continued to play through McCormack, who drastically improved his offensive efficiency. The Jayhawks’ only loss in their last nine games came in overtime at Texas.
There is (obviously) no precedent for how a conference tournament withdrawal might affect KU’s seeding, but the Jayhawks were generally expected to be on the No. 3 or No. 4 line. The right, or wrong, matchup would go a long way toward determining KU’s success or failure.
Specific matchups are now among the least of KU’s concerns. The NCAA will have replacement teams standing by, but any selected teams with at least five healthy players will be able to play.
Kansas men’s basketball has had a lot of good fortune over the years, but the breaks they’ve received this time of year could make you believe in curses. Last March, they had the country’s consensus best team when the world shut down. Three straight years before that, Udoka Azubuike was injured. In 2014, Joel Embiid missed the NCAA Tournament with an injured back.
Now comes a COVID-19 case.
The world is better than it’s been in months. Case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are down. Vaccines are up, and being distributed across the country. Schools are opening, fans are being allowed at games and life is generally starting to creep away from the hellscape of the last 12 months and toward something sort-of-maybe-kind-of-in-some-ways-resembling normalcy.
Last year’s NCAA Tournament was among the first major sports events canceled. This year’s — even with limited fans, even with an altered schedule, even with all games in Indiana — represents one more step of progress.
The NCAA Tournament is perhaps the country’s favorite sporting event after the Super Bowl, and even with all the changes a lot of us have been looking forward to this for two years.
And we still are!
But now it’s with a reminder we didn’t need about the the precariousness that remains in our world.
There will be talk about how this is all unnecessary, that conference tournaments should not have been played at all. There is no doubt that the television money at stake made canceling or voluntarily withdrawing from conference tournaments a non-starter.
But it’s also not quite that simple. We all make risk-reward decisions every day. We decide to stay home or go out, to order delivery or mask up. We don’t even know how the virus was contracted by this KU player, or whether the positive test result would have been prevented by Kansas not playing in this week’s tournament.
The cynical view is that unpaid college athletes are being forced to play a sport that requires them to be in close and sweaty contact with teammates and opponents so that billions in TV revenue can be distributed largely to people nobody tunes in to watch and who assume no risk.
That cynical view is not without merit.
But we also shouldn’t pretend like college basketball is the problem, or even that it’s reasonable to believe canceling a tournament or season would reduce spread of the virus. We have no choice but to co-exist with the virus, at least for a while longer.
That process is going better, but we are far from the finish. This is a reminder we didn’t need. There will be more. The world will continue to move on.
