The NCAA Tournament begins one month from today and the NCAA is hoping that fans could be allowed to attend the games.
March Madness is quickly approaching, as the Ohio State Buckeyes have just five games left in the regular season (beginning tonight with Penn State, which will be televised on Big Ten Network at 8 p.m.). One of the lingering questions with the Big Ten and NCAA having each moved their postseason tournaments to Indianapolis: will fans be able to attend games this year?
NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt spoke with media members on a Zoom call on Thursday afternoon through the Greater Columbus Sports Commission.
Gavitt said it was a non-starter for the NCAA while determining a tournament site if players and coaches' families couldn't attend. That was never going to be an issue for them. Each team will be allowed to travel 34 as part of their official travel party, which includes players, coaches and athletics administration, with each member of the travel party allowed to have six guests. That makes a total of approximately 200 people per team and 400 total for any given game.
General fan attendance is still being debated, but Gavitt said there would be no more than 25 percent capacity at any of the venues they are using to conduct the tournament.
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“In many cases we won’t even come close to 25 percent by keeping that six feet of physical distance needed in each of the venues,” Gavitt said. “But maybe by the time we get to Lucas Oil Stadium, a much larger venue, we may have slightly closer to 20 or 25 percent capacity.” He said he would expect an announcement to be made on fan attendance in the next several days.
A couple of other notes from Gavitt's discussion with the media
- Ball State University and Indiana State University will serve as backup locations for the tournament in case there's a sudden outbreak that prevents one venue from hosting its scheduled games.
- Gavitt addressed the topic of having to replace teams that might have to opt out of the tournament because of CoVID, saying, “I think we saw that in Columbus with The Basketball Tournament this summer and how they managed that with teams on standby. We have a plan that the men’s basketball committee has approved, women’s basketball committee will look at tomorrow, and we think we have a good solution there.”
- Gavitt said there won't be any replacement teams once the tournament has already begun, but teams will undergo testing for seven consecutive days prior to the tournament commencing. “We hope and think that the risk of an entire team being ineligible for the championship is low, but nevertheless, we know from what we’ve seen in the regular season that disruption is part of this,” Gavitt said.
- With schools around the country opting out of their conference tournaments, Gavitt said each individual league will be responsible for coming up with its own was of determining an automatic qualifier into the tournament. “We did a deep dive with conferences and ADs around this topic of what the real risk is around teams maybe opting out, and what the perceived risk is, and the committee ultimately decided that authority should still remain at the local and conference level,” Gavitt said.
Ohio State will compete in the Big Ten Tournament during the week of March 8-14. March 14 is Selection Sunday.
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