He’s talking bubbles, and not in the sense of which basketball teams are looking to make the tournament field in late February.
Color me surprised. Pleasantly so, but still.
NCAA president Mark Emmert endorsed the idea of potentially using bubbles for NCAA championships — including basketball — in the first half of 2021, saying Thursday night that it’s “perfectly viable in many sports.”
“Starting with 64 teams is tough. Thirty-two, OK, maybe that’s a manageable number. Sixteen, certainly manageable. But you’ve got to figure out those logistics,” Emmert said in an interview on the NCAA’s website. “There’s doubtlessly ways to make that work.”
Emmert said that Joni Comstock, the NCAA’s senior vice president of championships, and Dan Gavitt, senior vice president of basketball, have been working with committees and conferences to figure out the logistics and economics of how it would work amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s obviously expensive to do that,” he said. “But we’re not going to hold a championship in a way that puts student-athletes at risk.
“If we need to do a bubble model and that’s the only way we can do it, then we’ll figure that out.”
He’s still saying “student-athletes” there, so I’m not at all sure he’s thought through the ramifications of how you force your unpaid labor to stay confined somewhere in the absence of a negotiated agreement between the two, but maybe he’ll get there.
One thing’s for sure, he won’t lack the motivation to do so. The NCAA clearly needs the money and will do everything it can to avoid cancelling March Madness for a second straight year.
In any event, based on what we know at the moment, the bubble model is the safest way to protect athletes in competitive leagues, so let’s hope the NCAA can find a viable path for this.