ESPN analyst Jay Bilas says ‘football is going to be played,’ but is concerned about ‘compromised’ college basketball season
By SDS Staff
Published:
Sports fans everywhere were crushed in March when the NCAA pulled the plug on March Madness and all other spring sports championships due to the COVID-19 outbreak. As professional leagues including the NBA and MLB work toward resuming and college football moves forward in its prep for fall, the 2020-21 college basketball season has been somewhat of an afterthought for many fans. In a recent interview, ESPN hoops analyst Jay Bilas shared his concerns about the upcoming college basketball season, particularly the preseason and out-of-conference fall/winter slate.
“It’s a little bit scary, the idea basketball could be compromised,” Bilas said during a recent interview with “Packer and Durham” on ACC Network, per 247Sports. “We’re going to play football. Football is going to be played. But what I’ve been hearing from different schools is they’re going to try and start school early and bring students back in August, no fall break, and they’ll try to close things down for the first semester in November. There’s contingency planning for not having students on campus the second semester, because of a potential second wave of this and normal flu season, so that could compromise basketball.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re seeing coronavirus cases spike and without contract tracing to deal with that. It is concerning and the truth is none of know what’s going to happen, but basketball has more questions because it’s an indoor sport. Fewer players and everything, but It’s indoors, so the idea we’re going to have fans in a super-spread type event I can’t imagine. We’ll learn a lot from the NBA this summer and how college football goes about things, but I don’t see anything but a bumpy ride, but I just hope we get to the ride.”
As Bilas states, college athletic directors and administrators will learn a lot from football players’ return to campus. Hopefully, workout shutdowns like at Houston are isolated and do not have to happen on other campuses. But it is certainly reassuring to hear that he is confident that football will be played.
Saturday Down South reports and comments on the news around the Southeastern Conference as well as larger college football topics.
