Pandemic forcing teams to adjust their schedules once again
Last season in college basketball, teams and conferences knew pandemic-related postponements and cancellations were pretty much assured. They prepared accordingly.
This season has been full of unpleasant surprises, in part because some of the scheduling precautions weren’t taken. The virus threat had seemed to be slowing down until the particularly contagious omicron variant arrived and started disrupting rosters.
“We’ve learned you don’t know anything except day to day,” West Coast Conference Commissioner Gloria Nevarez said. “It changes so quickly.”
According to NCAA figures, about 5% of Division I men’s games and 7% of women’s games had been postponed or canceled through Sunday. Last season, about 13% of all men’s games and 17% of women’s games were canceled.
The NCAA doesn’t include previously postponed games that now have a makeup date in those totals. If those rescheduled games are taken into account, about 9.5% of men’s games and 10.7% of women’s games through Jan. 3 had been postponed or canceled, according to Associated Press research. As of Thursday, that means 445 women’s games and 410 men’s games.
Finding new dates for all those games can prove tricky, particularly since many conferences didn’t prepare for the likelihood of postponements the way they did last season. The Big 12, for example, kept the final week of last season open to schedule makeup games; it did not do that this season.
“This year, it was going well,” Big 12 executive associate commissioner John Williams said. “We’d actually gotten through football. We’d started on time like we were supposed to. We didn’t really foresee that until that first week that it hit, and we lost three games in that first week of January. By then, it was too late to move the schedule back.”
The Big 12 has been luckier than most: It had only three conference games postponed thus far, and one of them already has been made up. It has not been as easy elsewhere.
“During the 2020-21 basketball season, we built a lot of wiggle room, several trap doors, collapsible bye weeks anticipating some volume of rescheduling,” said Michigan State associate athletic director Kevin Pauga, who sets up schedule optimization plans for several conferences. “There aren’t as many trap doors in these schedules (this season) for a whole host of reasons.”
Rescheduling games is particularly important for a conference such as the WCC, which is in position to get four NCAA Tournament bids for the first time ever with Gonzaga, BYU, Saint Mary’s and San Francisco all having NET rankings in the top 40.