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Bama News
As has happened with football, it feels like an inevitability that college basketball games will be postponed and/or canceled throughout the season due to COVID-19. While most conferences seem to have built in extra room at the end of the regular season to make up a couple of contests, it's quite possible that many teams will lose games altogether. That will affect conference championship races.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey addressed the media on a conference call Wednesday and spoke frankly about the high likelihood of the league's basketball schedules being disrupted. And he made it clear that there's a good chance the SEC's regular-season champion will be crowned by winning percentage due to the challenge of having all teams complete a full 18-game slate.
āWe built in some accommodation at the end, probably for two games max, and then youāve just going to have to deal with winning percentages where games may be lost," Sankey said, according to a transcript from Jon Hale of the Louisville Courier-Journal. "Youāre going to have to accept that disruption as a reality. Given the scope of basketball season, the effort to play multiple games in a week, thatās a reality that (has) informed the consideration, itās informed the explanation. What itās not done is caused us to build in a whole set of additional weeks into the season, as youāve seen. The short answer is I acknowledge that reality and weāll have to adjust accordingly if meaningful disruption occurs.
ā... The reality in basketball is we do have a 14-team postseason event where you do have an opportunity to compete for that tournament championship. Iāll assume that some thinking is guided by that reality, but still, you want to try to minimize disruption, accommodate adjustments but there are limitations.ā
The SEC released its men's basketball conference schedule on Friday, and there are no games scheduled between March 4 and the start of the conference tournament in Nashville on March 10. But as Sankey said, teams can realistically only make up one game ā maybe two ā in that span. As such, Sankey said the SEC's strategy is to do all it can to avoid mass cancelations from coming to fruition.
āThe lesson from what weāre dealing with now is disruption when it occurs has the potential to be for multiple games," Sankey said. "That reality is present. If I back up, before we put out that schedule, we actually encountered the postponements associated with Florida and Vanderbiltās football programs, and I observed to our athletic directors, I think said it to our head menās basketball coaches ā¦ if youāre looking at the potential for disruption, part of our learning experience is that can be up to two weeks, which is four games. So we have to avoid that. You want to avoid that, is the right way to state it.
