NCAA declines to fill in brackets for what-if tournaments
The NCAA Tournament selection committees did not release brackets to reflect what could have been for the canceled tournament.
Many players and fans had hoped to find out where their schools would have landed in the tournament — would mid-major Dayton get a No. 1 seed in the men’s tournament? — but Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball said Sunday that won’t happen.
The NCAA canceled March Madness tournaments for both men and women Thursday amid the global coronavirus crisis.
“The world is experiencing a challenging health crisis with the coronavirus pandemic.” Gavitt said in a statement. “It is an unsettling and concerning time in our history. For those of us who love and treasure college basketball, it has resulted in the cancellation of NCAA basketball championships and an empty month that otherwise would be filled with tremendous excitement. The disappointment and heartbreak we all feel for student-athletes unable to compete is significant, yet nothing is ever more important than the health and safety of studentathletes, coaches and fans.”
Gavitt said that when the tournament was canceled Thursday afternoon, there were still 19 men’s conference tournaments and 18 for the women that had yet to be completed, meaning 37 automatic qualifiers hadn’t been determined between the two tournaments.
“The important work of
the basketball committees is to set up competitivelybalanced brackets to determine national champions. I don’t believe it’s responsible or fair to do that with incomplete seasons especially for tournaments that unfortunately won’t be played. Therefore there will not be any NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball championship selection shows or tournament brackets released this year.”
Gavitt said he heard from coaches and athletic directors who wanted to see where their teams would have been placed, but he said that wasn’t right.
“There is not an authentic way to produce tournament fields and brackets at this point without speculating and that isn’t fair to the teams that would be positively or negatively impacted by manufacturing March Madness,” he said.
And it wasn’t right, especially now, he said.
“More importantly, in light of this global health crisis, I believe we need to keep college basketball in perspective,” Gavitt said. “To be clear, this is my decision. The basketball committees support and concur.”
Kansas was in good shape to grab the No. 1 overall seed and have two stories told at the same time.
The Jayhawks could be staring at serious sanctions from the NCAA, which has targeted them with the dreaded “lack of institutional control” for a series of alleged recruiting violations. They were also being led by Udoka Azubuike, the big man who left Nigeria when he was a kid for a better opportunity to play basketball. He was hoping to be reunited with his mom at the Final Four in Atlanta.
Would the Jayhawks have made it to Atlanta? Who was ready to step in if they didn’t?
A top candidate for Most Inspirational would’ve come from Dayton. The struggling Ohio city was shattered by a mass shooting last summer. Trey Landers, a senior guard at the 11,000-student Catholic school, was among those who escaped from a bar as a gunman approached with an assault-style weapon. “Our team is helping pull the city together a little bit. ... It’s bigger than us,” Landers said recently. The Flyers, at 29-2 and ranked third in The Associated Press poll, were headed for a No. 1 seed.
Rutgers also was on the verge of making history. One of the most downtrodden sports programs in America was projected to make the tournament for the first time since 1991. “We would have won some games, too,” coach Steve Pikiell said. Now, all the Scarlet Knights can do is wait ‘til next year.