2021 can’t be any worse than 2020, right? Don’t be so sure. We are only five days into the New Year as I write this, and we are already off to a bad start.
The vaccine rollout that is supposed to crush the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. appears as rough as a Cam Newton pass. Drug manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna had shipped 20 million doses as of last week, but only 3 million had been given. In Florida, seniors lined up and shuffled their folding chairs for hours toward a vaccination. Finger pointing between federal and state officials isn’t solving the problem.
December was the deadliest month in the U.S. since the disease landed on our shore a year ago, and public health officials are bracing for another surge after 80 million Americans traveled during the Christmas-New Year’s holiday period. We have passed 350,000 deaths from COVID-19 in this country alone.
While much of America suffers, President Trump continues his weeks-long rants and raves about the November election, insisting without a shred of evidence that he is being robbed of a second term. He spent an hour on the phone Saturday trying to convince the secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican, to overturn the results there because of alleged fraud. Again, no evidence. Fortunately, Brad Raffensperger stood up to Trump. Not so the spineless Republicans in the Senate and Congress who march right behind this danger to democracy.
But wait! Good news arrived Monday when the NCAA announced it is returning March Madness, formally known as the Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament, to us. So what if the games are scheduled only at venues at Indianapolis, home of the NCAA, and at the University of Indiana and Purdue University, each about an hour’s drive from downtown.
Hallelujah! And good luck with that, Mark Emmert and Dan Gavitt. Emmert is the NCAA president, Gavitt the vice president of basketball. After cancelling the tournament last March because of the pandemic, Emmert said Monday that “we want to deliver this year on the promise of March Madness. They deserve it.”
They being teams and fans, he said. And CBS and Turner, which televise the games. And college and university athletic departments, which reap millions of dollars from television and broadcast rights fees. He didn’t say that.
Gavitt, former athletics director at Bryant University and son of the late Dave Gavitt, the visionary founder of the original Big East Conference, acknowledged the challenge will be “complicated and difficult. . . . the environment in which we live is drastically different, which means the tournament will have a different feel as well.”
Like, possibly only family members, those ridiculous cardboard cutouts and recorded crowd noise in those cavernous arenas.
If the start of this college basketball season, and what passed for a college football season, is any indication of the hurdles between now and the Final Four April 3-5, completing March Madness will require a miracle. Cancellations and postponements have been more common than rainouts in Major League Baseball. The latest: Villanova is postponing its next three games because two players tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday, and coach Jay Wright is about to emerge from isolation after testing positive the day after Christmas.
Closer to home, Providence College, the University of Rhode Island and Bryant University have scrambled with their schedules. PC games against Xavier, UConn and DePaul were postponed. URI grabbed a last-minute December 9 date at Wisconsin. Bryant plugged a schedule hole with nearby Division III Rhode Island College. Brown, the other Division I school in Rhode Island, is not fretting about schedules. The Ivy League cancelled all winter sports.
Not to overlook women’s basketball, the NCAA is considering one general location their March Madness, most likely the San Antonio area. The Final Four is scheduled April 2-4 at the Alamodome.
Good luck!