College Basketball

How conferences are dealing with COVID rescheduling

Updated Dec. 29, 2021 6:17 p.m. ET

By Andy Katz
FOX Sports College Basketball Analyst

No one was prepared for the Omicron variant’s impact on sports, particularly on scheduling. This is becoming more and more apparent with men’s and women’s college basketball.

Both nonconference and conference games have been knocked off the schedule over the past several weeks, as more than 100 men's college basketball games have now been canceled or postponed this season. While the nonconference games that have been impacted are unlikely to be played, the hope among most conferences is to play a full slate of games this winter in some form or fashion. If that can’t be done, then highest win percentages could again be used to create conference tournament seeding, as was the case last season.

The good news for college hoops, which came from the CDC this week, is that a person with a positive case can have their quarantine time reduced from 10 to five days, with masking for the final five.

This should help in getting teams back on the court more quickly, assuming their positive players and/or staff do not remain symptomatic. Also, the trend of moving away from testing fully vaccinated (with a booster), asymptomatic individuals seems to have a strong tailwind in sports.

But the bad news for most conferences is that unlike in 2020-21, there aren't makeup days built into the schedule. The plan this time around was for a full season of games to go uninterrupted. But COVID-19 had other plans.

What's more, having fans in the stands means that rescheduling games is more difficult, as you have to deal with refunds and date changes. A number of conference assistant commissioners also said that flight crews for travel aren’t as flexible, with factors such as Omicron going through airline personnel and the airlines trying to be up to normal schedules — which they weren’t a year ago.

Overall, conferences don’t have the rescheduling structure that they did last season. That means — in the case of the American Athletic Conference, for example — schools are taking the lead to find a date and then having the conference office approve the game. Leagues with odd numbers of teams, such as the ACC, AAC and Big East, have byes build into their league schedules, but common byes don’t exist unless games were canceled. The only way to add a game in many instances is for teams to play three games in a week.

Tom Odjakjian, the senior associate commissioner from the AAC, said that of the 20 dates for 19 games, there is only one date when three teams are off. The other 19 dates have a single team off. Last season, Odjakjian said, games were being filled on the fly. If two teams couldn’t play on the same date, but two other healthy teams could, then they would play (assuming they hadn’t played twice already).

So far this season, the Big East has been hit hard by the virus, with 11 conference games postponed (instead of forfeits with the change in policy) through Dec. 28. All teams but Villanova have had at least one game postponed.

Michael Coyne, the senior director of basketball operations for the Big East, said the conference will have teams play three games in a seven-day window but won't do so in consecutive weeks. He also said that as of late December, the league is hopeful that it will have enough time to get all the games in before the Big East Tournament.

The conference did make it clear that a school must have at least seven scholarship players and one countable coach to play a game. Oh, and tickets for the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden are on sale.

The Big Ten plans to play all 140 of its conference games and already plays all seven days of the week, so it’s not out of the question for a team to play three games in a week.

The SEC hasn’t allowed for three games in a week — yet.

The Big 12 has two teams down now, in TCU and Oklahoma State, so it's too early to know how the league will react. But with only 10 teams in the conference, there might be more opportunities to make rescheduling work.

Andy Katz on the impact of COVID-19 cancellations on college basketball

Andy Katz reacts to the cancellations and postponements around college basketball as a result of COVID-19 outbreaks. Katz touches on the cancellations of the Ohio State Buckeyes vs. UCLA Bruins, the Kentucky Wildcats vs. the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Memphis Tigers vs. the Tennessee Volunteers.

The ACC has had five conference games postponed, which has in turn impacted eight teams through Dec. 28. Paul Brazeau, the ACC’s senior associate commissioner for men’s basketball, said that playing four games in eight days could happen, but it wouldn’t occur in successive weeks.

Brazeau made a good point as to why shutting down for two weeks wouldn’t happen. What if a team was supposed to play Duke and North Carolina during those two weeks and then didn’t get that chance again? Those games could help a team get into the tournament but would also be a competitive inequity if another team played them. The best-case scenario is to try to keep going and make up as many games as possible in a fair manner.

The Pac-12 has had eight games postponed through Dec. 28. Given that the Pac-12 is mostly a Thursday-to-Saturday league, the conference has flexibility with rescheduling games for Mondays and Tuesdays. Jamie Zaninovich, the conference’s deputy commissioner, said the hope is to get every game played this season.

"We’re confident we’re not going to pause," Zaninovich said. "Our doctors said we played a full season last year during a pandemic with no vaccines. We’re confident we can play a full season with vaccines."

Andy Katz is a longtime college basketball writer, analyst and host. He can be seen on FOX Sports and Big Ten Network platforms, as well as March Madness and NCAA.com, and he hosts the podcast "March Madness 365." Katz worked at ESPN for nearly two decades and, prior to that, in newspapers for nine years.