COVID-19 main X factor this college basketball season
College basketball has gotten soupy and surreal again for San Diego State, the Mountain West and nonPower 5 stakeholders trying to navigate the barrage of COVID-related body blows entering 2022.
At last count, six conference teams — Boise State, Fresno State, San Jose State, Wyoming and now, Nevada and UNLV — are stuck in health-protocol pause. With torpedoed matchups Wednesday for UNLV and San Diego State, everyone in the league has missed at least one game.
In a conference with an unbalanced schedule, the competitive playing field already is fractured in multiple ways.
Who lost a key home game? Who doesn’t have to play at altitude? Who was out of position because of injuries or other factors in early January, but is locked and loaded for a possible makeup game in late February?
The far bigger picture, however, is what all of this could mean when the time comes to determine atlarge bids for the NCAA Tournament. That image becomes foggier for those without royal-blue blood.
This isn’t the Big Ten, which routinely gets seven or eight teams in the tournament. This isn’t the ACC, Big 12, SEC or Big East, with name recognition and backroom committee sway galore.
These are teams and conferences that cannot afford to miss a single game that could fatten their ranking in the NET, a critical tournament-deciding metric.
In the Mountain West, pointmaking involves fleeting windows of opportunity. Rare are the shots to take down a heavyweight, particularly on national TV.
If the Aztecs miss a shot against No. 20 Colorado State — including Saturday, as fill-ins for Nevada at Viejas Arena — it could snuff the chance to sneak into the bracket as a bubble-buster in a conference where only the tournament winner is guaranteed a ticket.
Even that certainty could be mucked up. Lost games or the timing of potential makeups could alter conference tournament seed
ings in ways that handcuff favorites for the title. And on and on.
Just two Mountain West teams, Colorado State and Wyoming, own a NET ranking higher than the Aztecs. That means the good-win versus bad-loss ratio remains tilted heavily in the wrong direction. Toss in the fact Wyoming’s last three games have been postponed because of COVID and next Wednesday’s matchup remains in limbo at best.
There’s also the question of whether a team might feel incentivized to pull out an iffy contact-tracing excuse to dodge bad matchups.
Impacting all of that uncertainty are the myriad ways conferences and states approach COVID protocols. Does a positive test mean a key player sits for five days? Ten? Do some teams test infrequently, if at all?
National basketball guru Jeff Goodman of Stadium, who also worked at ESPN, CBS and Fox, reported that his polling of 125 programs found 58 percent did not consistently test after Christmas break, including everyone responding from the Big 12.
When Air Force put a scare into nationally ranked Colorado State on Tuesday, despite missing three starters and three others in the eight-man rotation, coach Joe Scott outlined the lack of consistency.
“If we were in the Big Ten, if we were in the Pac-12, if we were in the ACC, (players who missed another game the week before) could have played today because they’re in the back of the end of the whole five days,” Scott told the Colorado Springs Gazette. “The Mountain West still says it’s 10 days, so they couldn’t play.
“They’re asymptomatic … they’re being told they can’t play. Eighteen years old, asymptomatic. And in our case, we’ve taken the step to be boosted a while ago. Those are just the circumstances.”
Now, Colorado State is rushed into scouting the Aztecs (and vice versa) and traveling to one of the toughest places to play in the Mountain West.
So, the opponent is not just in front of you … if you can get someone in front of you. It’s the other conferences and other states, including the rules and protocols that guide and determine game fates.
According to ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, bubble teams include Indiana, Florida, Mississippi State, Virginia Tech, Clemson, TCU, Wake Forest, Florida State and Creighton, among others.
That’s a rain forest of sashay to machete through if you’re San Diego State or another Mountain West team on the brink.
Come March, a comparable team might slide into Bracketville because it had a shorter quarantine period for its players that fueled a NET-fueling upset. A lack of apples-to-apples testing could keep a team in another conference intact to pad the résumé at critical moments.
The inequity of it all amounts to college basketball quicksand, especially for the relative “have nots” with paper-thin margins of error.
It’s not enough to simply hit jump shots. Now, lowertier teams need to thread the protocol needle and cross fingers about facing the teams that could kick open the stubborn tournament door.
It’s one thing in the monied Big Ten, for example, if key games require makeups down the stretch. They simply charter a plane from Madison, Wis., to State College, Pa., if that’s what it takes.
In the Mountain West, a crucial game in Logan, Utah, or Laramie, Wyo., likely means commercial flights at the whim of the fragile and cancel-happy airline industry — in winter. Throw in buses and altitude, just for energy-sapping good measure.
If an at-large team from the Mountain West survives despite all those perilous what-ifs, they’re likely to be more gassed by the time they face a pampered name program in the already rugged NCAAs.
Some will say to all of it: The only thing fair about the COVID era is that it’s exceedingly not fair.
There’s uncomfortable truth to that, of course. Another truth, though, is that a system already out of balance for those without name cachet becomes increasingly more so.
We grow up being taught that sports fates are determined by players and teams. This season, that’s no guarantee. Not by a long shot.