Only essential staff, limited family are allowed to attend NCAA Tournament

March Madness has given way to March Sadness.

Trying to avoid spreading the new coronavirus that has become a global pandemic, the NCAA decided the men’s and women’s tournament games will be off-limits to the general public, including likely women’s first- and second-round games at Stanford.

“I have made the decision to conduct our upcoming championship events, including the Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments, with only essential staff and limited family in attendance,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in a statement.

The NCAA tournament is one of American sports’ biggest events with office pools a staple of fan engagement. In its 81-year history, the tournament has been a stage for lesser-known schools to make a big splash with upsets and fan-frenzied atmospheres.

“The decision was based on a combination of the information provided by

national and state officials, by the advisory team that we put together of medical experts from across the country, and looking at what was going to be in the best interest of our student-athletes, of course,” Emmert told the AP. “But also the public health implications of all of this. We recognize our tournaments bring people from all around the country together. They’re not just regional events. They’re big national events. It’s a very, very hard decision for all the obvious reasons.”

The men’s Final Four is scheduled for April 4-6 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The women’s Final four is scheduled for April 3-5 at Smoothie King Center in New Orleans.

Emmert told The Associated Press that canceling the tournaments was considered and there are discussions to move the men’s Final Four to a smaller arena in the area. The NCAA also will consider using smaller venues for second-week regional sites currently set to be played at the Toyota Center in Houston, Madison Square Garden in New York, Staples Center in Los Angeles and Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

“We have to determine the availability of the sites, obviously, but it doesn’t make good sense to have a football stadium be empty,” Emmert said.

All sites for next week’s men’s games will remain the same unless conditions in those areas force relocation, he said.

Plans for refunding tickets purchased in advance were being worked out.

Emmert said it would be up to conference officials and their members to decide how they wanted to proceed with their tournaments for the rest of the week. Some conference, like the Big West, had already started limiting fan access.

The Pac-12 played the first games of its tournament in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and the Southeastern Conference tournament started in Nashville, Tennessee. The Big East began play Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden in New York. There were no immediate plans to limit access to those tournaments.

March Madness hits another level next week with the start of the NCAA Tournament to crown a national champion.

The decision was announced ahead of “Selection Sunday,” when the 68-team bracket is revealed. Games begin Tuesday and Wednesday on the men’s side in Dayton, Ohio, where earlier in the day the governor said he would issue an order to restrict spectator access to indoor sporting events.

The women’s bracket is scheduled to be announced Monday.

There are eight first- and second-round sites for the men’s tournament, scheduled to be played March

19-22. Locations include Cleveland; Spokane, Washington; Albany, New York; Sacramento; and Omaha, Nebraska.

The women’s tournament first- and second-round games begin March 21 and will be played at 16 sites. The second-week regionals will be played in Dallas, Greenville, South Carolina; Portland, Oregon; and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Final Four will be held at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans where the NBA’s Pelicans play on April 3 and 5.

Also on Wednesday, the College Basketball Invitational, a third-tier NCAA tournament, has been canceled. In a statement, tournament officials called it the most “prudent” course of action because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The decision applies to more than just men’s and women’s basketball.

All NCAA-sponsored championships including hockey’s Frozen Four will be affected.

But the men’s basketball tournament is the crown jewel, one of the most popular events on the American sports calendar. March Madness draws hundreds of thousands of fans to arenas from coast to coast. The men’s tournament generated more than $900 million in revenue last year for the NCAA and its members, though the majority of that was from a media rights deal with CBS and Turner that pays about $800 billion per year.

“We’re like any enterprise of this size, we have business interruption insurance, and a variety of other things but we’ll sort that out in due course,” Emmert said.

Emmert said CBS and Turner plan to broadcast the games us usual. Other media members will be allowed into the arenas to cover the games, but how many is still being determined, he said.

Emmert said a protocol for the medical screening of people entering the arenas is still being worked out, too, along with what constitutes essential staff (bands? cheerleaders?) and how to define family members.

The Big 12 men are playing at the Sprint Center in downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

Commissioner Bob Bowlsby said teams will be allowed 125 tickets on a game-by-game basis beginning with Thursday’s quarterfinals. The arena will be cleared after each game. The tickets will go to guests of student-athletes and staff members but pep bands, cheerleaders and dance teams will not be allowed. The policy also will be in place for the women’s Big 12 Tournament, which begins Thursday night a few blocks away.

Emmert said the games will go on, but cautioned that nothing is set in stone due to the outbreak.

“This will be a continuing story,” he said.