|
| D3sports.com photo illustration; original artwork by Steve Frommell, d3photography.com |
By Ryan Scott
D3hoops.com
When it comes to the 2020-21 Division III basketball NCAA Tournaments, there’s good news and bad news. The good news: Everything there is to know about these tournaments, their composition, location, timing, and selection is fully public. The bad news: There’s almost nothing to know for sure.
“The idea that we’re going to do a 48-team tournament, with six teams at eight sites feels unlikely,” says Wheaton coach Mike Schauer, committee chair for men’s basketball. “Given what the NCAA announced for Division I, it just seems hard to believe they’ll send us to eight sites.”
That plan, with a smaller tournament played over two weekends instead of three, in a series of three-round, single-site events, is still the plan. Neither committee expects to hear definitively if it will remain the plan until early February at the earliest. In the meantime, they are operating as normal – with regular committee calls and plans for regional advisory committee meetings and regional rankings on schedule.
“We’ve obviously pushed our timetable back a week,” adds Schauer. “With selections being moved back a week, but other than that, we’re tentatively planning to do our calls and rankings at the scheduled times.”
It’s not entirely clear who will be making the final call – either the Championships Committee or the Management Council – both of which met as part of the NCAA Convention held this past week. It’s unknown whether winter championships were discussed, but no information has yet been forthcoming.
Under the guidelines put out in September, men’s and women’s basketball need 60% of teams participating in the 2020-21 season to hold an NCAA championship. Currently, participating means playing a minimum of nine Division III games, although waivers are available for teams unable to meet requirements.
“We want as many teams as possible to have an opportunity to play, to be eligible to get to the table for championship selection,” says women’s committee chair and Texas-Dallas coach, Polly Thomason. “If you tried to play and you’ve submitted a waiver, we’re not going to be hard on you. I can’t imagine doing that, not with COVID.”
Schauer seems skeptical that the NCAA powers that be will budge on the 60% figure, but Thomason is hopeful, if the numbers are close, that we’ll be able to pull off a tournament of some kind.
“The biggest issue is testing,” she says. “We have to make sure that [our first weekend sites] have access to testing and access to [labs] that can process the tests rather quickly. We have to make sure we have enough teams that can get there in a safe way and that we’re able to test teams in an appropriate manner.”
Adds Schauer: “Are we really going to find eight hosts willing to bring six teams to their campus, without a guarantee your team is one of them? Are we going to pay to bring 48 teams to Fort Wayne in a bubble? The answer to that last one is ‘no way.’ We lack clarity on the other questions; it’s still up in the air.”
A number of schools have already called off winter sports competition. D3hoops.com is attempting to track those decisions as best as possible. There are also a number of conferences that have decided to push conference play into late February or even March and April, essentially forgoing the opportunity to compete for an NCAA title as the selection deadline is March 6.
“Our conference wasn’t realistically going to be able to play until mid-February,” says Albright men’s basketball coach, Rick Ferry, who is also co-athletic director and a member of the Division III men’s basketball committee. “We could have squeezed games in and gotten the contests needed to be NCAA eligible, but you’re looking at three games a week, and hoping everything goes right. It was also a very limited time period for the student athletes to actually compete – all for just one team to get into the tournament.”
If you ask around, everyone is hopeful. Nearly 20 conferences plan to hold some kind of conference schedule and select a champion before March 6. Another half dozen plan to play later. Depending on how the NCAA counts participation, the numbers may be there to hold a championship, although, as Schauer noted, the logistics are likely to change.
Many different scenarios have been suggested, from combining the Division II and III tournaments with the Division I bubble that’s scheduled to take place in Indianapolis, to drastically reducing the size of the tournament to something manageable at one site.
“I don’t think our committee would support a tournament smaller than 48,” says Thomason, “Even at 48 it’s hard to call it a national championship when we don’t even have the NESCAC playing.” Schauer agrees: “If we get too small, it’s hard to put the NCAA label on it. Maybe we do something anyway, but it wouldn’t be a ‘national’ tournament.”
Some teams do want to compete for that title, though, whatever asterisk it might come with. The Yeshiva men had their best-ever season cut short last spring by COVID, and return a stellar squad this year. “Our school has been absolutely awesome,” says coach Elliot Steinmetz. “They’ve pushed in every way possible to make sure that, No. 1, first and foremost, our guys are safe. At the same time, while they’re strict, they’ve been flexible to allow us to try and have a season in any way possible.”
Yeshiva currently has ten games scheduled, but is still working on more. “I don’t know what SOS will look like this year,” says Steinmetz, “but due to travel restrictions on other schools, we’ll probably be playing every game on the road – which is a great credit to our school for figuring out all the protocols to allow us to travel.”
Yeshiva is working without a conference schedule, largely because only three other schools in the Skyline are even trying to play games this year. “If the tournament does get called off,” says Steinmetz, “we will still play games, but we may not make those six hour trips we might if they could help us qualify.”
Qualification is another question mark. Division III has strict, largely numerical, criteria used by committees to select participants in the national tournament, which will be very difficult to navigate without further guidance. Strength of schedule will be moot for teams that only play conference games and winning percentage would be all over the map when teams will have played anywhere between (ideally) nine and 25 games.
“In Division I football,” says Schauer, “you had the debate between Ohio State and Cincinnati – one team that played fewer games than the other. They were able to sort of use the eye test to pick Ohio State, but we don’t have that luxury. Our first regional rankings could have a 2-0 team against one that’s played 15 games. How would we even rank the Northeast right now?”
As you can see, there are far more questions than answers, and while everyone is optimistic and planning for an NCAA Tournament, there’s almost no one that believes it will happen. If the NCAA were willing to push the tournaments back to April or May, there would be more teams willing and able to play and more time for games, but that also presents logistical headaches.
Says Ferry: “We only have so many athletic trainers and they would be spread very thin if everybody was going at the exact same time – not to mention sports information, transportation, facilities. We only have one turf field with lights and you can’t pull kids out of class to play during the day.”
With the NCAA allowing team activities through the end of the academic year (so long as teams keep under the maximum number of engagement days), some schools and venues are hoping to host tournaments that, while not officially postseason, will give some sense of reward for all the hard work put in during 2020-21.
Washington College, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is advertising for participants in two tournaments in late March and early April. A number of other venues are contemplating similar invitationals, but none has been announced or finalized as of publication.
As a coach, Schauer is all for it. “Absolutely, we’d love to do it, but I don’t think there’s any way my school would approve. If we’re to a place where we’re comfortable with teams traveling in April, all of our energy is going to be geared towards making sure our spring athletes get a full and complete season, so they don’t lose two years. As an administrator, I’d definitely support that.”
Ferry notes that at some point it becomes an equity issue, given limited institutional resources. “It’s not just about having or affording the tests, but you need the personnel to administer the tests. Just men’s and women’s basketball is 120-150 tests per week, which is manageable, but if you add 80 lacrosse players and 50 from baseball and softball, 50 from track, who’s going to do all these tests? Not our trainers, and our student health center is overwhelmed as it is.”
Ultimately, it is the wider consideration that will determine whether and what kind of Division III basketball tournaments take place. Fans, coaches, players, and committees are narrowly focused on basketball, but the NCAA itself, athletic directors, and school presidents have to consider the whole scope of their athletics and the safety of their campus and student bodies.
“We are going forward until they tell us otherwise,” says Thomason. “But I would’ve been a lot more confident about having a tournament if you’d asked me last week; there have been quite a few announcements this week of teams and conferences not playing.”
Says Ferry: “We’re still going to compete for something. We’re still going to compete for a conference championship and we can still hang a banner if we win, it just won’t say NCAA Tournament. Student-athletes just want some sense of normalcy and that means having practice and then going out to compete. The more we can give them of that, the better off we’re all going to be.”
