KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Hour by hour now, it seems, the COVID-19 coronavirus creeps further into our collective consciousness ... and range.
With that has emerged a sense of flux from which precious little appears immune _ including in a sports world facing unprecedented dilemmas as its members try to navigate the difference between practicality and panic and play on.
So it is that at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby could make the point that no medical advisers or officials have told the conference not to play its men's and women's tournaments here this week, or that they shouldn't play in front of a crowd ...
The unstated but hovering word you hear is "yet."
"It's very much a 'make decisions as you go' situation," Bowlsby said.
Because everything is provisional on the sports landscape for the foreseeable future and particularly when it comes to March Madness.
And we've got a living, breathing (and hopefully not coughing) microcosm of it here this week, with Bowlsby thankfully willing to be candid and expansive about the scenarios to a degree few in such positions have offered to now.
Speaking hours after the Ivy League announced it had canceled its four-team conference tournament, Bowlsby noted some of the differences between that format and this, and the level of known infections on the East Coast and Kansas City.
Stressing that he was speaking as a layman, he acknowledged his understanding through the University of Kansas Medical Center and CDC that the disease will continue to spread across the country.
And that they don't want to put anyone unnecessarily at risk.
And that this event could yet be canceled, before it starts Wednesday or even along the way to the championship games, among other possibilities they've had to consider.
"I think the next real decision threshold is going to be, 'Do you play in front of fans?'" he said. "And do you assemble 15-16-17,000 people in an enclosed area?"
Late Tuesday afternoon, the MAC announced that fans would not be allowed at its tournament. Noting that the Big 12 will be interested to see what comes of an NBA owners' meeting expected to take up that topic, he added, "I wouldn't say that our situation is just exactly like theirs. But we certainly want to learn from what other people are doing."
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal regarding the implications for the upcoming NCAA Tournament, NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline called such a notion a "worst-case scenario."
Then again, it was in play last weekend when Division III tournament games were conducted at an empty venue at Johns Hopkins.
It's hard to imagine the hollow echo of games played without fans.
And it's hard to sort out the remedies if, for instance, the Big 12 tournaments start only to be cut short.
"If we play the tournament, our tournament champion, as an example, has to be declared the conference champion," he said.
Without elaborating on specifics, he added, "There are some implications if we have something happen in advance of the tournament starting; we have some implications if it happens midstream. All the way to the end.
"But I don't think there's any way to forecast around that."
Fittingly enough for the broader situation.
"I think most medical professionals will tell you this was new ground for them, (that) this was a voyage of discovery," he said. "They can compare it to other diseases and to other viruses, but they don't all act the same at the same phase of their evolution.
"So ... part of the difficulty of this is there are not definitive answers."
Even as the sands seemingly shift all the time below.
"It's not very comfortable, but I guess it's the best we can do at this point," he said. "We have to rely on the best advice and best surveillance information we can get and try to do the right things."
So far, those "right things" are being distributed in small doses, so to speak. Following suit with the four most prominent North American pro sports, that includes curtailing media access:
Locker rooms will be closed for the tournament, the Big 12 wrote in a news release, with "all formal, informal and one on one interviews (to) occur in the interview room with coaches and student-athletes seated on the dais. Media must sit in the provided chairs."
For that matter, it might go farther than that with the media beyond the television rights-holders.
"If we find that we're going to do it without crowds in the building, we'll also have to decide if we're going to have media in the building," Bowlsby said. "And if so, how many, and where are they going to be and how will they operate and all of those kinds of things.
"So it's just another component of this that's really not able to be forecast in any sort of precise way."
While it's unclear how much difference media exposure might make when it comes to players who will have breathed all over, sweated on and perhaps bled and salivated on each other, that's a topic we'll see about exploring more as this develops.
But as Bowslby put it, "We don't take that step capriciously. (And) when armed with the information that less contact is better than more contact, we probably have to respond."
Along those lines, Bowlsby noted extra cleaning in the public part of the facilities, (Sprint Center for the men and Municipal Auditorium for the women) and locker rooms, keeping athletes sequestered from the crowd and more sanitizer dispensers in and around the venue.
He also said, "We're encouraging people that have pre-existing conditions to consider staying out of crowds."
As he thought about the weeks to come, Bowlsby reflected on his time serving on the NCAA's Division I Men's Basketball Committee in the early to mid 2000s.
Just before the "shock and awe" bombing in Iraq in March 2003, he said, "there was a lot of talk quietly about whether we would play the tournament. And what we heard back from (the Department of Defense) and from others was that the NCAA Tournament is a huge part of our American culture. And that they would like us to play the tournament and have it be as normal as possible."
This is different than that in many ways, of course.
But it does speak once more to the value we place on sports, whether or not we can attend, and why you tend to think the show must go on.
"If you're going to be quarantined," Bolwsby said, offering some levity, "you'd really like to have something to watch."
