More than wins and losses at stake

As more than 300 teams prepare to start a season that will look nothing like any before it, the conversation isn’t so much about who will be cutting down the nets at the end of March Madness as much as whether anyone will cut down the nets at all.

If some team, any team, does climb a ladder in Indianapolis — and the top candidates include the usuals, with No. 1 Gonzaga, Duke, Kentucky and Kansas among them — then consider the season a success.

Anything short of that, and nothing less than the future of college sports could hang in the balance.

This is the new world created by a COVID- 19 crisis that is mushrooming to more than 190,000 new cases a day across America just as college basketball gets set to tip off its season Wednesday.

Teams will play truncated schedules — many cut from 31 to 27 or 25 games — after truncated preseasons. It’s a shrunken, ever- shifting and still perilous grid laid out with the health of players and coaches in the forefront of everyone’s mind, but with an unspoken belief that the show really does need to go on.

The end game is the 68team extravaganza known as March Madness, the event that was wiped off the calendar eight months ago in a stunningly rapid turn of events as the seriousness of the pandemic set off alarms across the U. S. It cost the NCAA around $ 375 million, and sent shockwaves around the entire college sports landscape.

The NCAA is already making plans to turn this year’s postseason into something much different than it has been in the past — proposing to hold all games in a single city, most likely Indianapolis, which is where the Final Four is scheduled for April 3- 5.

Auburn imposes postseason ban.

Auburn’s basketball team won’t participate in postseason play this season as a self- imposed penalty stemming from a bribery scheme involving former assistant coach Chuck Person. The university announced the ban Sunday over Person’s steering athletes toward advisers and managers in exchange for money.