Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

For a preview of what the NCAA hopes to pull off, look to Las Vegas

Gonzaga

David Becker / AP

Gonzaga celebrates after defeating BYU for the West Coast Conference men’s tournament championship Tuesday, March 9, 2021, in Las Vegas.

Of all the anomalous protocols, strategies and workarounds that have been put in place to stage the NCAA basketball tournaments during the pandemic, consider what McCarran International Airport might look like this weekend with charter jets lined up on the tarmac like cabs outside a LaGuardia taxi stand.

The routine will be vastly different from the usual scenes of teams celebrating the televised bracket reveals — on Sunday night for the men and Monday night for the women — and then spending a few days practicing and studying film back on their campuses before traveling to one of many sites spread all over the United States.

Most teams, whether they qualify for the national tournament automatically by winning their conference championship or via an at-large berth, will travel by flight or bus directly from their conference tournament site to Indianapolis for the men and San Antonio for the women. The cities will host the NCAA’s first tournaments contained to one metropolitan area.

The idea is to allow teams to tunnel from what they hope is one virus-free environment to another. Thus, the NCAA is commissioning armadas of planes and buses around the country to transport teams.

In Las Vegas, where four men’s championship games will tip off after 3 p.m. on Saturday, anywhere from eight to 10 teams should be looking for flights to Indianapolis by Sunday. Several more women’s teams could be heading out on Monday.

“Is it whoever shows up first gets their choice of plane?” Dan Butterly, the commissioner of the Big West Conference, said he kiddingly asked NCAA officials. “Maybe you’ve got an Allegiant plane and then next to it there’s a United plane with first-class seats. We joked about how many planes are going to be out there.”

As the 31 men’s and women’s conference tournaments roll on this week, they are more than the usual prelude to the NCAA tournaments; they are models of the extreme measures that officials have employed to ensure pulling off the NCAA tournament, a financial bell cow that was expected last year to generate $800 million before it was abruptly canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The NCAA is hoping that by bringing 68 teams to Indianapolis and 64 to San Antonio — all after being required to clear seven days of negative tests, and isolating them in hotels where they will be fed, tested daily and outfitted with contact-tracing sensors — it can make it from start to finish in two tournaments that will last nearly three weeks.

Teams must first get through their conference tournaments. An example of how tricky that can be arrived Friday, when Northern Iowa could not play its Missouri Valley Conference quarterfinal against Drake because of a positive coronavirus test among its players, coaches, managers and training staff. The game was called off 30 minutes after the scheduled tipoff and Drake was sent through to the semifinals. And on Monday, Florida International was removed from the Conference USA tournament, which begins Tuesday, because of coronavirus protocols.

The undertaking closest to what the NCAA is trying to pull off may be in Las Vegas, where five conferences are playing their men’s and women’s tournaments. The Pac-12 finished its women’s tournament on Sunday with Stanford, ranked No. 2 nationally, rolling to the title, while the West Coast Conference tournaments finished on Tuesday. The Pac-12, Big West, Mountain West and Western Athletic Conferences will conclude their men’s tournaments on Saturday.

Unlike some conferences that have sold tickets — including the Missouri Valley, which put 1,900 tickets on sale for each session of the tournament, which concluded Sunday — the tournaments in Las Vegas have not. The Pac-12 and the WAC will allow a limited number of family members, but the Big West, the Mountain West events will be closed to spectators, as was those of the WCC.

“Everybody’s trying to protect against the same thing,” said John Hartwell, the athletic director at Utah State, whose teams are making the 500-mile trip to the Mountain West tournament by bus to avoid the risk of contracting the virus at an airport. The men’s team, which has a solid case for an at-large bid with an 18-7 record, will be taking only 24 people who can interact with players, coaches and staff (out of an allowable 35), and traveling on two buses to reduce the risk of infections.

Added Hartwell: “The worst-case scenario is winning the conference tournament or getting an at-large bid and then you get a couple positives and have to shut it down.”

Few teams in the country are more fearful of that than Gonzaga, whose men’s team is unbeaten, has been ranked No. 1 for the entire season and is seeking its first national title. The Zags arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday and returned to Spokane, Washington, Tuesday night after beating BYU in the men’s championship game. They will continue the NCAA-mandated seven-day testing routine at school, as will the Stanford women and the five other Pac-12 teams that are expecting invitations to San Antonio.

In years past, the Zags would spend the night of the title game in Las Vegas, celebrating with their friends, families and some of the thousands of fans who had traveled south. This year, Gonzaga kept its hotel a secret. It arranged for rock star treatment: separate floors for its two teams, a side-door entrance to the hotel and a path to be cleared to and from the elevators.

“We’ve never told student-athletes before that they can’t go to the lobby or go for a walk,” Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth said. “People want to reach out and touch our players. But we don’t want that right now and not because we’re being snooty.”

He added: “We want to be sure we’re doing everything in our power to make sure that the outcomes are decided on the court, and not off the court with COVID. We’re trying to be diligent, vigilant and whatever ‘nts’ there are.”

The anxiety of losing another shot at a national title to the pandemic — the Gonzaga men were 31-2 and ranked second when the NCAA tournament was canceled last March — had earlier led Gonzaga coach Mark Few to wonder if his team should even play in the WCC tournament. But not playing would have left the Zags without a game for nearly three weeks and also made them an inviting target.

“If we don’t play, it’s not a good look,” Roth said. “We already have a really big bull's-eye on us. We don’t need to give people more ammunition.”

After the WCC finished its tournament at the Orleans, the arena was scrubbed before the arrival of the WAC, which began its tournaments on Wednesday morning. “They’re the guinea pigs,” said Ron Loghry, the deputy commissioner of the WAC, whose teams will all stay at the Orleans.

In normal years, the conference tournaments in Las Vegas run in parallel universes. While the WCC and the WAC are at the Orleans, the Mountain West is at the Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of UNLV, the Pac-12 men are at T-Mobile Arena and the Pac-12 women at Mandalay Bay. The Big West moved its tournaments to Mandalay Bay in December out of concern that health restrictions might prevent it from playing in Anaheim, California.

Since then, the five conferences have met almost every Friday for 60-90 minutes to plan for what feels like a new event. “We’re all rewriting our handbooks,” said John Sullivan, the assistant commissioner from the Mountain West.

The questions have seemed endless.

How many spectators are allowed at each venue by local health officials? When will coronavirus tests be administered? How many press members and NBA scouts will attend and where will they sit? How will teams get to the arena? (The Pac-12 women, Big West and WAC teams will walk out of hotels and through parking lots to auxiliary arena entrances to avoid walking through casinos where they are staying.)

Where do conferences find people to mop the floor? (Stanford football coach David Shaw was conscripted at a Cardinal home game.) Where will teams practice? (The WAC found two courts at an area convention center.) And if a conference winner has to drop out of the NCAA tournament, who will replace it?

“The first thing an administrator will ask you when you tell him something is ‘what is everybody else doing?’” said Loghry, the WAC official. “At first we were bouncing ideas off each other, but then we’d get into the weeds and pretty soon it was sports information directors, marketing, entire staffs were on it. Somebody would say, ‘what are you doing about X?’ and you’d think, ‘oh, God, I didn’t think about that,’ and it would lead to our next week’s to-do list.”