I have always had mixed feelings about the conference tournaments.  On one side, it basically gives every team a chance to play their way into the NCAA Championship Tournament.  On the other hand, small conference regular season champions have worked all season to be the best representative from the conference, only to have to prove it for 3-4 more games to keep their season alive.

Whether you agree or disagree with having the tournaments, what happened today is wrong for so many reasons.   While I can not be sure, I think this is the first time that a school has ever won an invitation to the tournament due to the fear of spreading a disease.

That’s right – the Ivy league has made the decision to cancel their men’s and women’s conference tournaments this week due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.  And so, Yale as the regular season champion has been declared the Ivy League champion that will win the bid to the dance.

This is wrong for so many reasons.  I do not want to dismiss any concerns about coronavirus – I understand people are nervous.  But there are a few reasons that I really disagree with this decision.

First of all, the flu also kills thousands of people each year, and I have never seen a conference cancel their tournament because there was a flu outbreak.  And there have been years where the flu has been pretty bad.

Maybe this strain of coronavirus is more dangerous than a typical virus.  But no one on the 4 teams playing in the Ivy league tournament to my knowledge has been diagnosed with the coronavirus – if they are worried about having lots of people in a stadium which risks spreading the disease, then simply play the games with no fans.  You can’t spread a disease if no one in the stadium has it, and unless someone is hiding something, no one from the Yale, Harvard, Princeton or Penn basketball teams have it.  I am sure that Harvard, Princeton and Penn would rather have a chance to win the tournament in an empty stadium that simply have their season end.

To add to this, the Ivy League announced it will limit spectators to all remaining sporting events for the year.  But those events are still going to play – including the NCAA quarterfinal for the Cornell women’s hockey team or the ECAC quarterfinal for the Cornell men’s hockey team.  Last time I checked, the coronavirus doesn’t have a special bias that would make it infect basketball players but not infect hockey players.  If those games can be played with no fans, why can’t the basketball games?

But lets say we are concerned about the risk of traveling for these athletes.  Then this is the most hypocritical piece of it.  If they are that concerned, than the Ivy League should be announcing that they are ending the seasons for all their league.  Instead, they are going to let the Yale players travel to the NCAA Tournament, to much larger stadiums that are in locations of the United States that have had more identified cases of the coronavirus than Massachusetts (the state announced an increase from 28 cases to 41 cases – prompting the cancellations).  What happens if Yale gets sent out to Spokane, Washington or Sacramento, California?  What happens if they pull a few upsets and make the regional final in Los Angeles or New York?  If there was this true level of concern for the athletes, the Ivy League would tell the NCAA they are not sending a representative.  Instead, they are removing the small risk for the Yale team now and exposing them for a much larger risk in a week.

I am not a public health expert – and so I can’t say how dangerous the coronavirus is.  But there were plenty of options that they could have continued to have this competition.