ESPN’s plans to set up an NBA-like bubble for its college basketball events in Orlando have been scuttled due to ongoing differences between the network and the participating schools regarding the health and safety protocols required for participation, The Athletic has learned. The decision impacts 10 events owned by ESPN and more than two dozen schools who were supposed to play in them, and it has thrown what was already a chaotic environment with regard to scheduling into further disarray just one month before the season is set to tip off on Nov. 25.
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“We’ve decided to redirect our efforts to be sure the teams have enough time to make other plans,” Clint Overby, vice president of ESPN Events, told The Athletic. “At the end of the day our bias was toward safety and making sure that what we pulled off was in the best interests of the sport. In the absence of those things, we decided we’re better off letting schools do their own thing.”
The plans to move the ESPN events from a variety of locations to Orlando were never finalized, so the network isn’t canceling anything so much as abandoning its efforts to bring it to fruition. Several teams had indicated their desire not to participate at the outset, and as the various parties got bogged down in the details of the health protocols, ESPN faced the prospect of losing even more participants.
The plans broke down mainly because ESPN was trying to abide by guidelines handed down by the Centers for Disease Control and the NCAA, which are more restrictive than the protocols many conferences are planning to implement. The biggest point of contention was ESPN’s desire to stick by the guideline stating that anyone who has tested positive for coronavirus must be re-tested after that person has been clear for 90 days. Several schools balked at the idea of retesting players that soon. “The 90-day testing protocol became the key sticking point,” Overby said. “Once we laid that out there were individual schools who couldn’t agree because their conference rules are more open-ended with respect to when you test someone again who has contracted the virus.”
The other rough patch was the dialogue surrounding the proper procedures if a player tested positive for COVID-19 while he was in Orlando. Initially, ESPN suggested that the player might have to be quarantined in Orlando for 14 days, but the various parties were working to modify those protocols to give more oversight of the player to the teams, who could then remove him from Orlando and return him to school. Even if that could have been worked out, the challenge remained about how to contact trace the rest of the team as well as any opposing players. “No matter what, we would have had to contact trace the team out of protocol,” Overby said. “But we would not have had to isolate the entire team for 14 days. I know there were concerns about that, but that was never the intent.”
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Because the size of the pool of teams had shrunk at the outset, ESPN was planning to rejigger the events so that most teams who came to Orlando to play in a tournament would be scheduled to play two games instead of the usual three. On top of that, several teams were hoping to add an additional game or two that had not been previously scheduled.
Overby said the network hopes to salvage two doubleheaders, the Champions Classic and the Jimmy V Classic, at other locations. Michigan State, Kansas and Gonzaga were scheduled to play in one of the two remaining events as well as a multi-team event in Orlando. Virginia, Florida State and Texas Tech are among the dozens of teams that will be affected by the cancellation of the Preseason NIT, Orlando Invitational, Diamond Head Classic, Wooden Legacy, Charleston Classic and Myrtle Beach Invitational. If the Champions and Jimmy V do not happen, that would affect Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, Baylor, Illinois and Tennessee.
The only events impacted by this decision are the ones that are owned by ESPN Events. Other MTEs that appear on the network, such as the event formerly known as the Battle 4 Atlantis and the Maui Invitational, will still be played at alternative sites, in Sioux Falls, S.D., and Asheville, N.C., respectively. In addition, the Gazelle Group and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame are trying to set up a similar bubble scenario at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut in December. Those plans are still moving forward, although organizers are encountering many of the same challenges that sunk the Orlando plan.
The schools impacted by this decision now face the difficult task of finding replacement opponents on short notice. When the NCAA’s Division I Council pushed back the start of the season last month from its usual Nov. 10 date, it set the maximum number of regular-season games at 25, plus one MTE. Schools are doing all they can to play the maximum, although they do not need to be concerned about eligibility for the NCAA Tournament because the council cut the minimum number of games to 13.
Losing MTEs is especially problematic for mid-major schools because those events offer a rare chance to burnish their NCAA Tournament résumé against high-major teams on neutral courts. Many mid-major schools are already taking a huge financial hit because they have either lost the chance to play so-called guarantee games, which normally draw high-five-figure payoffs, or they will play those games at substantially reduced amounts because of the lack of fans.
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ESPN’s decision to abandon its Orlando plans will have reverberations throughout the sport. Besides the scheduling challenges it will create, it also highlights the concern across the country about whether the NCAA’s guidelines, and specifically its suggestion of a team-wide 14-day quarantine in the event of a positive test, will prove to be too stringent and disruptive. This is especially troublesome because if a team is isolated for two weeks, it will take several more days for players to get back into game shape before they can resume competition.
These are complicated questions in complicated times, and for the moment ESPN couldn’t come up with the right answers. “If this were a normal year and we lost events, I’d be very disappointed,” Overby said. “But in a year where public safety and student-athlete safety is the guiding principle, I’m not going to be disappointed we had to pull the plug on something when there were so many unknowns we couldn’t bridge.”
(Photo of Florida State’s Anthony Polite, left, and Virginia’s Kihei Clark: Geoff Burke / USA Today)