Bohnenkamp: I'll Miss The Tournament
I'll miss the cups.
You've seen them on TV during the NCAA tournament, when the cameras are focused on a coach and behind him is a table of sports journalists. Or on the bench, when a player is getting a drink.
There's always a cup there. Blue, with a name of the sponsoring soft drink, with the NCAA logo.
Trust me — you can't go anywhere without a cup.
Want to take that Coke to your seat? Sorry, it needs to be in a cup.
That bottle of sports drink? Nope, sorry. Cup. Now.
Water? Yep. Cup.
I've covered enough NCAA tournaments to the point where I am, to borrow from The Shawshank Redemption, institutionalized. It's instinct.
Get a drink. Get a cup.
I'm going to miss the cups. I'm going to miss the media rooms. I'm going to miss being courtside — yes, in the NCAA tournament, a lot of us still get to sit close to the court. I'm going to miss being with my friends, the people I've spent a lot of long seasons with, the ones who know I'm going to find a good steak place.
I'm going to miss the bracket. I'm going to miss Selection Sunday.
I'm going to miss the NCAA tournament this year.
I wanted to be in St. Louis — I need to count how many tournament games I've seen there in my career.
Or maybe Omaha, Or Cleveland, Or Tampa. Or Spokane.
Somewhere. Anywhere.
I get it. I know why there isn't a tournament this year. It makes perfect sense.
You don't want to get sick. I don't want to get sick. I don't want to be somewhere and then bring back the COVID-19 coronavirus to get you sick.
I don't know what the chances are of catching it. Maybe not that great of a chance. Maybe a greater chance than what we know.
We don't know anything. And that's why there's no tournament.
I miss the NET. I miss bracketology. I miss the "bubble."
A college basketball season is long. You've got a media day in early October. The first games are early November. There's always a tournament Thanksgiving weekend. There are those two Big Ten games to start December, there is that rivalry game against Iowa State, and then when January gets here there are 20 Big Ten games.
Then it's the Big Ten tournament, then a new bracket, and the tournament begins again.
It didn't begin for anyone this season.
It didn't begin for Iowa's Luka Garza, a candidate for national player of the year.
Ryan Kriener didn't get to play in an NCAA tournament as a senior. Neither did Bakari Evelyn, who came to Iowa as a graduate transfer with the hopes of getting to the tournament. CJ Fredrick was in the Hawkeyes' locker room last year at the NCAA site in Columbus, Ohio as a redshirt, sitting out the season so he could be better prepared for this one.
For a lot of the Hawkeyes, there was bitterness to how they finished last year, when they nearly completed a record-setting second-round comeback against Tennessee. They wanted more.
They wanted another chance.
The same could be said for the women's basketball team. It would have been a familiar stage for Iowa's Kathleen Doyle and Makenzie Meyer, key parts back from last year's Elite Eight journey who would have been playing in their final tournament. It would have been a bigger stage for Monika Czinano, a backup to national player of the year Megan Gustafson last season, one of the nation's leaders in field-goal percentage this year.
They're at home.
We're all at home.
Bracketology has been replaced by self-quarantine. We're not arguing about who is on the "bubble," but we are talking about who is hoarding toilet paper. We don't look at Ken Pomeroy's analytics anymore, now we're looking at the numbers of who is sick, and who could get sick.
I miss what March should have been. I miss what it always has been.
A friend posted a photo on social media from an NCAA Division II site he would have been working. The signs for the tournament had been delivered, the setup was complete.
Nobody would be playing there. Nobody would be playing anywhere.
What might have been this weekend, he said.
I had one message for him.
Get me a package of cups.
