MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - APRIL 06: The Texas Tech Red Raiders huddle on court during the first half of the semifinal game in the NCAA Photos via Getty Images Men's Final Four at U.S. Bank Stadium on April 06, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Brett Wilhelm/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

NCAA Tournament 2021: How will the NCAA, Indianapolis pull this off? Here’s how

Dana O'Neil
Mar 1, 2021

In the movie “Ocean’s 11,” before Danny Ocean (George Clooney) lays out the details of his epic heist of three Las Vegas casinos to Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), he explains the difficulty of it all. “It’s tricky,’’ Ocean says. “It’s never been done before. It’s going to need planning, a large crew.’’ Nonplussed, the two recruit nine others who spend days studying the habits of various casino workers, create a replica of the casino vault and execute test runs of their complicated act of thievery.

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Take away the law-breaking and the devastatingly handsome Hollywood cast, and you essentially now know what it will require to pull off the men’s NCAA Tournament later this month in and around Indianapolis. The NBA bubbled 22 teams at one resort in Orlando, and the NHL, MLB and NFL all pulled off their championships. No one has tried to bring together 68 teams to play a 67-game tournament in six buildings over the course of three weeks during a global pandemic.

“This is like working a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with the pieces turned over while standing on a raft in a pool,’’ says L.J. Wright, NCAA director of the men’s championship. “You wake up in the middle of the night because something else has jumped into your head. It really is madness.’’

The reasons for such inanity were established long ago. Once college basketball honchos agreed to have a season, hosting a tournament became non-negotiable. The financial implications of a second year without a postseason would have been astronomical, not just to the national office but also to all of the athletic departments that count on the revenue from their tourney share. Corny as it might sound to the cynical, there also existed a dogged determination not to disappoint again, the memories of the shining moments that weren’t still plenty fresh in people’s minds.

So the tournament would happen. Which beget the next question: how? In January the NCAA announced it would house the entire thing in Indiana and primarily in Indianapolis, creating what JoAnn Scott, the NCAA managing director for the men’s championship, calls a “snowglobe.’’ It’s an important distinction. This is not the NBA bubble at Disney, where everyone was confined to a resort, allowing for fun activities within the compound such as rounds of golfs. This is movement within a city, where those who are part of Tier 1 essentially will move from a transportation bubble to a venue bubble to a hotel bubble and back again.

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Coaches looking to expend a little energy won’t be allowed to head out to the downtown Central Canal towpath for a jog, but instead will have to utilize a gym space created and monitored within the convention center, or run in designated directions around the convention hallway. Itchy players anxious to get in a few extra shots will have to wait for their assigned practice or shootaround time. “It’s undeniable that the first week of the tournament is very structured,’’ says NCAA executive vice president Dan Gavitt. “The scheduling is highly coordinated for testing, for practicing, for meal time, for transportation, all of it. As we win and advance, it gets more flexible. To the winners go some spoils.’’

But those spoils come with a big ask: the two teams that make it to the national championship game essentially sealed in Indy for 23 consecutive days. “It’s like that Jack Nicholson movie,’’ one coach says. “‘The Shining’ and ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’’’

Ordinarily the 60 staffers who help pull off the tourney start planning a good 18 months in advance, and they begin in earnest once the nets are cut down the previous year.

This year, with the stakes impossibly high and the demands unprecedented as officials try to get to the April 6 title game, they had little more than two months to orchestrate what will be arguably the most complicated sporting event since COVID-19 entered into the lexicon a year ago. How did they get here, and just what will the NCAA Tournament look like? The Athletic spent the past few weeks asking people in charge those very questions.

Pre-planning

Leonard Hoops laughs at his apropos surname. “With a name like Hoops, I’m gonna roll with this,’’ says the president and CEO of Visit Indy. His ancestors, who went by Hoopes, came over with William Penn and settled in Pennsylvania, but the man in charge of Indianapolis events spent most of his life on the opposite coast, in California. In his previous jobs, with San Francisco Travel and the Sacramento Visitors Bureau, he visited Indianapolis frequently and always came away impressed with the city’s teeming convention and events industry. Hoops moved to town a decade ago and took over the events crew that brings in some $5 billion annually.

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Among those big events: a steady flow of NCAA Tournament games. In normal years Indianapolis is almost an ideal Final Four city. It’s walkable and contained, the action centered within a few blocks, and its massive convention center (566,000 square feet), hotels, Lucas Oil Stadium and downtown mall are all connected by a skywalk that feels like the country’s biggest hamster maze. “We were a bubble before a bubble was a thing,’’ Hoops says.

NCAA staffers began talking with city planners as early as November about moving the entire tourney to town, recognizing that the easiest way to handle such a mammoth undertaking was to keep it all in one place. Indianapolis, already selected to host the Final Four, made sense but that connectivity also made it attractive.

That Indianapolis has had some dry runs helped too. Since July, the city has hosted an AAU basketball tournament, a cheerleading competition, a USA gymnastics event and more volleyball tournaments than Hoops can recall, each bringing thousands of people. The Colts pulled off an entire NFL season without interruption, and the Pacers are trucking along through the NBA schedule. Even better, much of the infrastructure already had been updated to meet the COVID-19 protocols.

The convention center, for example, underwent a massive overhaul, including everything from a $47 million air filtration system rebuild to simple directional signage to mitigate close contact. To limit contact at both Bankers Life Fieldhouse and Lucas Oil Stadium, X-ray machines now scan bags and purses rather than security folks, and fieldhouse concessions sales are not only cash-less, it also includes what Rick Fuson, the Pacers president and COO, calls “reverse ATMs,” machines that turn cash into cards to use for purchases, rather than a card that gets the machine to spit out cash.

Fuson, who doubles as the chair of the Indiana Sports Corp board of directors, jokes that he has spent more time thinking about restrooms recently than he cares to admit, and says plans are in the works at Bankers Life to add stalls that open and close on their own. “We’re making sure we have as pure a site as we can possibly have,’’ Fuson says. “We had to spend some money to do it, but it’s the right thing to do.’’

As the likelihood of Indianapolis as tournament hub grew, Hoops reconfigured some of his scheduled events. Though Indianapolis had marked off April 1-6 for the Final Four, the city hadn’t planned on an NCAA Tournament beginning on March 18. “There was a lot of back and forth the first couple of weeks, of ‘I’m not moving up my event,’ and so on,’’ he says. “It wasn’t that difficult, but it took some time.’’

Just like the NCAA, the city has a very real financial interest in making this work. Indy has lost almost a year of convention business, as well as the NBA All-Star Game and the NFL Combine, all adding up to devastating hits to the city’s pocketbook as well as the businesses that count on regular visitors. Hoops wrote a memo early in the planning, cautioning people to temper their expectations. Bringing fans to town — the NCAA recently announced 25 percent capacity for all games — helps, but in 2015 the city made $70 million off the Final Four alone; this year Hoops hopes the three-week tourney, with fans, will generate $100 million.

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Setup

Scott pauses during a 40-minute interview and lets out an exasperated sigh. “Oh, my God, the laundry,’’ she says. “We still need to figure out how to do the laundry.’’ This is the crux of it: Nothing is normal. Even mundane and rudimentary tasks are complicated. When Scott first met with her staff, she suggested they rip out all of the information from last year’s manuals and just leave the tabs with the to-do list titles. “This is how we’ve always done it,’’ she says. “That’s not a thing anymore.’’

Identifying hotels for the tourney teams, for example, was easy. Combined the J.W. Marriott, Marriott, Westin and Hyatt have more than enough beds to accommodate the 2,312 people (68 teams times 34 people per travel party) who will be housed for the first week of the tourney. Each of those hotels is connected to the convention center and Lucas Oil by the skywalk. But none of those hotels had the bandwidth necessary to handle the countless 18- to 22-year-olds watching YouTube or playing video games. That had to be brought up to speed.

Michigan-based Connor Sports has been supplying the NCAA with its tournament courts since 2006. Ordinarily it all takes months, the company working with the NCAA on design, identifying places to source the raw materials and then the painstaking process of sanding, priming, drying, curing, finishing and painting the 14 courts that will serve as the playing surfaces for the NCAA Tournament. This year the NCAA ordered up seven from Connor Sports for the game venues, plus an additional 12 from Praters to be used inside the convention center for practice. Spalding is supplying the goals. Typically each court is outfitted with the city site on the baseline. Those logos all had to be redesigned to reflect the all-Indy locale.

Even the courts will have to look different for this year’s NCAA Tournament. (Denny Medley / USA Today)

The Lucas Oil Stadium court will arrive this week, but most won’t be put down until days — if not hours — before the first practice or game. Although the courts come in 225 pieces, assembling them is not usually a big deal. Most workers are accustomed to flipping arenas from basketball to hockey to concerts and back again and can pull it off in three to five hours. But the sheer breadth of this job will take some doing, not to mention the unique installations. The court at Hinkle Fieldhouse, for example, is original and has never been topped with a removable court. “There definitely might be a learning curve in some of these cases,’’ says James Gabour, the events project manager with Connor Sports.

In addition to turning the convention center into practice central, Scott and her staff also wanted each team to carve out meeting spaces there, as well as a workout room for coaches. That all had to be created and made big enough to allow for socially distanced seating. Chairs, signage, water bottles, tables — all of that had to be ordered too, as well as the additional mops, buckets and cleaning supplies from Hillyard to keep the practice courts clean. Scott thought she had crossed every T until it dawned on her that athletic teams go through a lot of ice. “Ice baths, ice for injuries, icing after practice,’’ she says. The solution: Ice trucks will be parked on the convention center floor.

As for that laundry? “We’re still working on a laundry plan,’’ Scott says.

Travel

As Scott begins to explain the lengthy process of getting teams to Indianapolis, she pauses and describes what’s happening outside her window. “Of course I can’t tell you if there will be a snowstorm,’’ she says. “Or mechanical issues.’’

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The NCAA always handles travel for its tourney field, and it’s always complicated. While fans around the country fill out their brackets, the organization’s travel committee turns its bracket into color-coded whiteboards as it works out the travel logistics. Think Pushing Tin, with logos.

The good news this year: Everyone is headed to the same place, and the place is conveniently in the middle of the country. The bad news: time. Although the First Four games won’t be played until Thursday (March 18) and the first round on Friday, athletes and coaches must twice test negative upon arrival in Indianapolis before they can even practice (after seven consecutive days of negative testing prior to leaving). The goal, consequently, is to start bringing teams in on Saturday, March 13, the last arriving no later than Monday night. “We basically have 48 hours to get our planes, crews and buses here,’’ says Scott. And it’s not like she knows exactly where to find them. Instead Scott will have buses and planes “positioned in large cities, so we can get out quickly.’’

The NCAA is asking both conference champions and those that believe they have a shot at an at-large bid to remain at their conference tournament sites until it’s time to head to Indianapolis. SEC insiders, for example, said they are prepared to house — and foot the bill — in Nashville for multiple teams that could secure an at-large invite. That won’t, however, work for everyone. The West Coast Conference, for example, will conclude its tournament in Las Vegas on March 9. Should Gonzaga make it to the title game, the Zags, who moved into an off-campus hotel on Feb. 28, will return there before heading to Indy.

Twenty-three teams will have secured automatic bids by March 13, and those winners will start to head to Indianapolis that day, depending on when their games conclude. The other eight (no Ivy League this year) automatic qualifiers as well as the 37 at-large selections will depart Sunday night or Monday morning.

The same mileage rule of thumb used every year applies: Those stationed more than 350 miles from Indianapolis will fly; the rest will bus. For teams that take to America’s highways, the 34-person travel party will be split into three buses, and whether it’s planes (no trains) or automobiles, the NCAA will provide seating charts to ensure social distancing. Everyone also will wear a Kinexon bracelet, a device that dings red if a person gets closer than six feet to another.

That’s not to be Big Brother but to help ease problems with contact tracing. The first priority is to make sure no one tests positive but if, God forbid, someone does, to count on proper social distancing to limit who gets withheld through contact tracing. If, for example, Player X is sitting in Row 11 next to a teammate on the charter flight, with a player in front of him and another behind, they’re all out. If Player X is sitting six feet apart from everyone, no one else is affected.

Once aboard their method of transportation, everyone will be given N95 masks and goggles, and asked to wear them for the duration. Bus drivers and flight crews won’t be allowed to handle luggage and will limit interaction with the teams as much as possible. After arriving in Indianapolis, the teams will be shuttled to their hotels by assigned drivers who will be partitioned off from the rest of the travel party and tested regularly. Just in case, the NCAA has backup drivers, playing the odds that someone might test positive.

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Hotels

Upon arrival, each team will head not just to its hotel, but also to its floor at the hotel. Access will be restricted to members of the team travel party — no visitors, no exceptions — to the point that elevator operators will ensure that no one ascends or descends with too many people aboard, and without teams mixing.

Pending two negative results, everyone will be asked to quarantine in their rooms, meals delivered to the doors. Eventually teams will have access to meeting rooms within their hotels, the space set up as it will be in the convention center, with proper social distancing and seats assigned by name. Teams can choose to eat together there if they’d prefer.

As for food, along with catering and room service options, teams will be encouraged to order in from a host of restaurants happy for the business — no one wants to guess how many to-go orders of shrimp cocktail St. Elmo’s will be making — and the NCAA intends to set up coffee and snack stations for hungry athletes who need to munch.

They’ve also worked up plans for shipping and receiving, guessing that teams stuck in Indy for upwards of three weeks might need stuff: new shoes, gear and so forth. The NCAA has leaned heavily on its pro sports peers for advice, recognizing that while it can’t duplicate what the NBA learned from Disney, it can learn from it. “It’s not a perfect bubble,’’ says Dr. Brian Hainline, the NCAA chief medical officer, who has been working on protocols for all sports for months. “But it’s pretty close. When they’re not on the practice court or playing, they’re always physically distanced and masked. The only exception is when they’re alone in their room or eating, but even when they’re eating they’ll be socially distanced.’’

The busiest bubble, however, also will be the loneliest. Niko Roberts, the NCAA’s coordinator of men’s basketball, enjoyed four tourney runs as a player at Kansas, and has fond memories and tons of mementos from his experiences. This experience won’t be that experience. There will be no going home between rounds, and no hanging out with roommates and teammates in between activities. There won’t even be the release of taking nice walks outside. Isolated all season, the team that wins the national title will finish the year having spent three (or more) consecutive weeks on the road, with just 240 game minutes of basketball to break up the monotony.

Through conversations with the NABC and coaches, NCAA officials know full well that players are already tired of being stuck in hotel rooms by themselves, and as much as they all talk of the “business trip” of the NCAA Tournament, they don’t relish the idea of such a long run. “We’re trying to find ways to keep them busy and to keep their minds going,’’ Roberts says. “There’s all of the different lenses: the academic perspective, the social perspective and the entertainment perspective.’’ The NCAA already has some activities planned, but asked to keep them under wraps to preserve at least a little bit of a surprise for the teams.

Testing

Along with finishing the tournament and crowning a champion, the biggest goal is the most obvious: Play the bracket as it’s structured. Although the NCAA has unveiled detailed plans for replacement teams, those only kick in before the ball is tipped. Once the tourney starts, the teams play on and if one is forced to go on pause, a no-contest will be declared. In other words, the other team advances.

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That is the diabolical worst-case scenario floated by plenty a doomsdayer, but Hainline believes it is relatively unlikely. “It would take a lot to remove a team,’’ he says. Between the parameters and protocols in place, the testing and the Kinexon bracelets, Hainline believes that even if someone were to test positive, if social distancing protocols are followed, contact tracing would limit removal to just one person. “It would not be a knee-jerk thing, where an entire team is out,’’ he says. “If everyone does what we’re telling them, we’re pretty confident we can get through this.’’

The lab at IU Health will handle testing, and participants will receive tests on game days with enough time not just to get results, but also allow for a second test in case of a false positive. As for a threshold to remove a team, Gavitt said the NCAA will follow NCAA Tournament guidelines. “The playing rule says you have to have five players available to play the game,’’ he says. “If it gets down to it, if you have five healthy players, you have the opportunity to play.’’

Practice

The player turns the crank A, which rotates the gears B causing the lever C to move and push the stop sign against the shoe D. The shoe tips the bucket holding the metal marble E.

The marble rolls down the rickety stairs F and into the rain gutter G, which leads it to the helping hand rod H. This causes the other metal marble I to fall from the top of the helping hand rod through the thing-a-ma-jig J and bathtub K, landing on the diving board L.

The weight of the metal marble catapults the diver M through the air and into the washtub N, causing the cage O to fall from the top of the post P and trap the unsuspecting mouse.

Those are the rules to Mouse Trap …

Or how teams will get from their hotels to the practice courts. While everyone is busy worrying about sequestering, the real trick is going to be moving, and never will the maneuvering be more difficult than in the first few days, when 68 teams have to get places.

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The NCAA essentially crafted a dummy calendar, mapping out both practice schedules and shootaround schedules. The names of the teams will be added to their assigned slots once the bracket is revealed and the TV schedule is released. That in and of itself was a chore. Getting teams to those assigned times will be near Herculean.

Let’s say, for example, it’s Gonzaga’s turn. First step: The elevators in the team hotel are sent to the Zags’ floor — and only the Zags’ floor — whereupon a limited number of players descend. That continues until everyone in the 34-person travel party who is attending practice is retrieved.

The players then have to get to the arena through the one-way skywalks or vans. Some will make the trek to Bloomington (53 miles) and West Lafayette (68) for games.

And then do it all in reverse. Over and over again.

About 60 officials will be used during the NCAA Tournament. (Streeter Lecka / Getty)

Officials

Sequestered from the sequestered, such will be the plight of the officials who agree to work the tournament. Housed in hotels separate from the teams, they also won’t have the convenience of the skywalk to get to work, and only each other to rely on, their lives boiled down to van rides from the hotel to games, and countless hours with absolutely nothing to do. “If they leave the hotel, they pack their bags and go home,’’ says NCAA supervisor of officials J.D. Collins. “It is going to be very isolated.’’

In some ways, the officials almost will have it worse than anyone else. The tournament schedule includes seven days without any games. While teams can fill the downtime with practice, officials will have nothing to do. Collins will host Zoom calls where work can be reviewed and preparations can be made for the next round, but otherwise officials can pass their time in a gym set up at the hotel, or in a common room where they can gather for socially distanced meals, conversations or maybe a game of Ping Pong.

Recognizing what is being asked of his officials, Collins has changed the way he will staff the tourney. Ordinarily an official might work just the First Four or just the first round. But the refs, like the team parties, will have to arrive on Selection Sunday and quarantine for four days to be able to participate. Collins figured that was a big ask for just one game. Consequently he will bring 60 officials to town to work through the second round, and then begin winnowing the list as the tournament continues: 36 for the regional weekend and 11 for the Final Four. Each round also will include standby and alternate officials, on call should someone test positive, suffer an injury or simply opt to go home. Fifteen standbys will be tabbed for the first weekend, only brought to Indianapolis if necessary, with eight on call for the regional and two for the Final Four.

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Collins will begin extending those invitations soon, offering not just the prestigious opportunity to call NCAA Tournament games, but also a lot of paperwork to explain exactly what will be required to do so. “It’s going to be, ‘Here is what this is really going to look like,’’ Collins says. “If you choose to opt out, tell me then. That’s fine. But if you choose to opt in — and I think most will — then you have to understand what you’re in. I’m not going to listen to a whole lot of whining.’’

Games

Mackey Arena in West Lafayette seats 14,240, Lucas Oil 67,000. Which is to say, one size will not fit all, but the same rules will apply regardless of where games are played. Schools can designate who sits where on their bench, but the expectation is that players and coaches will stick to their assigned seats, each spaced seven feet apart.

To make room for the extended benches, fans will be seated on the opposite side of the arena, and socially distanced, with tickets sold by household and distributed digitally. Gavitt, of course, is not naive. He fully expects clever people to engage in a little capitalism on the secondary market, but he expects that will be minimal.

The 25 percent fan capacity, too, is something of a misnomer: the 25 percent capacity includes everyone in the building, from players to media to workers to fans.

Upon arrival for games, teams will be housed in a holding area until it’s time to safely move on to their cleaned locker rooms. Those locker rooms won’t necessarily be the traditional spaces. Club lounges, media rooms, anything that allows for a little extra elbow room will be retrofitted to accommodate teams before games and at halftime, although the NCAA intends to do what it can to make those spaces feel as normal and homey as possible.

Fans will have to leave the arena at the end of each game, even if they have a ticket for the next game.

Enforcement

As much as critics might argue the point, the NCAA has no intent on playing Big Brother. There will be no NCAA bed checks or security cameras to alert officials if someone makes a break for a Dunkin’ run. Every plan has been communicated to the head coaches in lengthy video presentations and documents, and ultimately much of what has to happen will be left to their discretion. Participants will be asked to abide by and agree to a code of conduct that will include specific COVID-related criteria, and no doubt the penalty for failing to do so — expulsion from the tourney — would be monumental.

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No one expects it to come to that. Last year’s disappointment still stings, coaches remembering all too well the misery of having to tell players their season was over. As difficult, stifling and challenging as the three weeks might be, no one expects anyone to challenge the restrictions. “I think I manage stress fairly well,’’ Gavitt says. “But no doubt, there has been a lot of anxiety with this one. We care so much about the coaches and the players. We know what they’ve been through this year, and we know what this means to them. I won’t be relieved until they’re all back on their campuses safely. Maybe somewhere around 8 pm. April 6 I’ll start relaxing.’’

(Top photo: Brett Wilhelm / NCAA Photos via Getty)

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Dana O'Neil

Dana O’Neil, a senior writer for The Athletic, has worked for more than 25 years as a sports writer, covering the Final Four, the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals and NHL playoffs. She has worked previously at ESPN and the Philadelphia Daily News. She is the author of three books, including "The Big East: Inside the Most Entertaining and Influential Conference in College Basketball History." Follow Dana on Twitter @DanaONeilWriter