More than wins at stake as basketball season gets started

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 bottom line is that American higher education, not just athletics, is hemorrhaging like never before,” Duke athletic director Kevin White said earlier this fall to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, of which he is a member.

The NCAA is already making plans to turn this year’s postseason into something much different, and much less, 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 already scheduled for April 3-5.

Though a vaccine appears to be on the way, there’s a good chance that in March, fans and bands and mascots will largely miss out, much the way they’ve been missing out inside arenas and stadiums that have hosted recent NBA, MLB and NHL seasons, as well as the current