Duke's COVID-19 Forfeit a Harsh Reminder of the Pandemic's Loom Over This Postseason

For the second straight year, Duke’s men's basketball season ends in victory and dejection.

Usually, a team that wins its last game has captured a championship of some sort. That’s not the case for the bedeviled Blue Devils. They finished last season with a victory over North Carolina and then never got to play in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament when the sport shut down on March 12, 2020. This time around, a day short of that bitter anniversary, a positive COVID-19 test knocked them out of the ACC tourney on the day they were supposed to play Florida State. Athletic director Kevin White subsequently announced that Duke’s season is over.

The Devils looked good in winning their first two games in Greensboro, over Boston College and Louisville. That revived slim NCAA tournament bubble hopes, though they realistically needed to beat the Seminoles Thursday to make the field. They never got the chance.

It’s a brutal blow to the team. Coach Mike Krzyzewski said in a statement that this was Duke’s first positive COVID-19 test of the season, and clearly the timing could not have been worse. It’s one thing to simply not be good enough—this team had been pretty bad, going 11–11 in the regular season—but to have a second consecutive season snatched away prematurely by the virus is rough.

“We are disappointed we cannot keep fighting together as a group after two outstanding days in Greensboro,” Krzyzewski said in the school statement. “This season was a challenge for every team across the country and as we have seen over and over, this global pandemic is very cruel and is not yet over. As many safeguards as we implemented, no one is immune to this terrible virus.”

The school can second-guess its own ACC tourney plan, which backfired badly. Duke had been commuting the 50 miles each day between its campus in Durham and the Greensboro Coliseum, believing that the Washington Duke Inn—where the team had stayed all season—was a safer environment than a hotel shared by multiple ACC teams. But as the Durham Herald-Sun reported, the Duke campus has seen a sharp rise in positive cases tied to fraternity and sorority activities. The Blue Devils football program paused its spring practices earlier this week, with 10 students in isolation.

(This was a bleak Thursday for basketball brand names and the NCAA tournament. In addition to Duke calling off its season, Kentucky was eliminated from the Southeastern Conference tournament by Mississippi State, ending the Wildcats’ worst season since 1926–27. For the first time since 1976, there will be a Big Dance with neither Duke nor Kentucky.)

There was immediate concern that Duke’s opponent Wednesday night, Louisville, might have been exposed as well. But in a statement Thursday, a Louisville statement said that all Tier I people involved with the team tested negative and that the school is “confident … that we will not experience any contact tracing that would affect our team.” Louisville is probably on the right side of the bubble, but every team must have seven days of negative tests before playing in the NCAA tournament.

Which is the issue beyond Duke. This now is the specter that will linger over the Big Dance next week and beyond: what if a team’s One Shining Moment is snatched away by positive tests? And what if it’s a contending team, with a chance to reach the Final Four or win the national title?

COVID-19 protocols impacted the College Football Playoff championship, with a few key Ohio State contributors missing the game against Alabama. They wouldn’t have changed the outcome—the Crimson Tide won in a blowout—but in basketball a single positive test can have greater consequences.

The NCAA is planning to have four “standby” teams ready to fill in for any who cannot play an opening-round game. But after that, forfeits are in play in later rounds. A team having to forfeit a later-round game would be the worst-case scenario for the tourney.

That’s one reason why protocols will be extremely strict in Indianapolis.

Teams will begin arriving in Indy by this weekend. Each of them will be assigned to their own hotel floors, with assigned times for using the elevators to avoid interacting with other teams. Many of them won’t even experience the outdoors at all, traveling via enclosed walkways from their hotels to practice courts in the Indiana Convention Center. Hotel security will be tight, keeping anyone who isn’t one of the 34 members of a team’s official travel party from entering.

It will be an onerous existence for those that advance the farthest. But that’s the method the NCAA’s health experts believe is safest for the audacious attempt to host a 68-team tournament in a single state—most of it within a single city.

And still it seems entirely possible that something will go wrong. If the NCAA can pull off 67 games without incident between March 18 and April 5, this will be its most successful tournament ever.