Will Clemson Basketball Start on Time?
Football is the cash cow that rules all collegiate athletics. We all know that.
It's been easy to get caught up in will there or won't there be a season and what on earth will it look like if there is in 2020?
So it's excusable if questions for college basketball have been on the back burner. It does start more than two months after football, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be concerns about what it's going to be in 2020-21.
According to Gary Parrish of CBS Sports, there is real doubt that non-conference games in November and December will take place, and the college basketball season could follow precedents already set in college football when it comes to playing league-only games.
The concern of a later start time is based more on finances and player safety. Many of the major college programs host "buy games" in which they pay a lesser opponent to come to their arena. They package the ticket with a premier game so the only way you can be guaranteed a seat when Kentucky or Duke comes to town in the conference season is to also buy a ticket for the mid-major foe in November.
Here's what Parrish wrote about the new dilemma:
"Understand, there is currently no reason to think arenas will be filled with fans in November and December. So these buy games are unlikely to be anything but money losers. And if they're money losers, what's the point in playing them -- especially when power-conference schools will have no control over, or even any idea of, the COVID-19 testing protocols implemented by their opponents?"
That means we could be headed to a January-March season with conference-games only. If you go to Clemson's official website, there is still only one game listed for the upcoming season: vs. Alabama in the Holiday Hoopsgiving showcase at State Farm Arena in Atlanta.
Clemson is scheduled to play a pre-conference tournament in Cancun, Mexico, on Nov. 24-25, along with Purdue, Illinois State and Mississippi State. According to the Cancun Challenge website, tickets go on sale Sept. 15, but it's hard to see that event taking place outside the country with the pandemic.
According to a Clemson official, the game against Alabama and the Cancun Challenge are the only two finalized events for the schedule at this time.
This is the time of year that college teams begin releasing their non-conference schedule. Two years ago, Clemson's came out on July 12. Last year, it wasn't until September. Sometimes it takes a while to get all of the buy games set up and contracts signed. So there's not going to be an overreaction if nothing else is added to the slate this month, but it's something to keep an eye on.
College basketball does have the ability to see how football plays out and adjust where needed, but it appears that adjustment will be quite large for the game.
Here's more from Parrish on a later start:
"The advantage of building conference-only schedules that do not start until at least January is that they would give our country more time to get this virus under control and maybe, just maybe, discover a vaccine, and they would also allow a conference -- whether it's the Big Ten or Big 12 or any other league with tremendous resources -- to create testing protocols that are consistently applied to all. In other words if you're a Pac-12 school like UCLA, do you really want to spend the time and money it takes to regularly test and test and test only to then put your team on the court with a school from, say, the Summit League that probably isn't testing as often because they simply do not have the same resources?"
Regardless, the NCAA will do everything it can to make sure it holds its annual March Madness tournament after last year's event was stopped because of COVID-19. When, where and who Brad Brownell's squad plays feels very much undecided at this time.
