This is going to have a cascading economic impact. There are the channels that cover the tournament (e.g., ESPN), the tournament bracket sites that get ad revenue, the local businesses around the stadiums that host the games, and so much more.
It isn't likely. An NBA caliber player that is a senior will likely have played 100+ NCAA basketball games. A few good/bad games in the tournament isn't going to change their overall chance of getting picked in the NBA draft. And the NBA draft is very shallow to begin with, only 60 picks total and still some of those players don't make the teams. In the NFL and MLB it is very common for undrafted/late round picks to become stars, but not common at all in the NBA where your physical ability (which is easily measurable) is so important for excelling.
There also is the G-League which is essentially the NBA minor league. Anybody on the bubble of making the NBA who wants a job will get a chance in the G-League, and if they were truly NBA caliber then they'd prove themself and get the opportunity.
Do you think Zion Williamson would still be as legendary as he is now without last year's tournament? He was well-known going into it but I feel like his performance and the attention he got during it helped a lot.
Zion Williamson was already regarded as the consensus #1 pick prior to the NCAA tournament. Yes, I think Zion Williamson would still be as legendary as he is now without last year's tournament. If the extra rest would have led to him not getting injured in the NBA preseason, he may even be considered more legendary.
The guy is 6'6" and 280 lbs and can fly. There are only one of him in this world. The only other players like him in my lifetime are Shaq, Yao and Lebron. Just unique physical phenoms. He was going #1 regardless of his performance in the tournament. Heck, Yao and Lebron didn't even play college basketball and went #1.
there have been guys who went from a second round pick (non-guaranteed contract) to a first round pick (guaranteed $1M+) on the strength of their tournament play.
But of course there is another player who had a bad tournament or whose team didn't make the tournament that dropped from a first round pick to a second round pick based on another player rising.
I'm basically trying to answer this question: Is there a player who is talented enough to play in the NBA, but won't get that chance because the NCAA tournament is cancelled. The answer is no. If the player is on the bubble they'll likely get a G-League contract and if they excel in the G-League they'll get a shot in the NBA.
If they drop from the first round to the second round, they'll still get a chance. Obviously a good tournament or bad tournament might chance draft ordering and short term compensation, but the average NBA salary is ~7 million dollars. A million dollars here and there isn't going to make a difference if the player is truly NBA caliber.
This isn't meant to be directed at you, but it's hilarious to me what people are focusing on, or what supposedly triggers concern. And just what economic bubbles folks are in, with such little perspective for those around them that share common infrastructure that is going to be stressed in the coming weeks and months.
Look. I have multiple friends who have already had all of their shifts canceled for the rest of March. And guess what, nothing is going to be better April 1st. Those folks don't have investment funds to sell. They don't have 401Ks to skim from early, at great cost. They don't have friends and family with money and their emergency fund wouldn't even cover the costs of HALF of a Coronavirus test, let alone a weeks worth of rent.
We need to be talking about suspending evictions, delaying mortgage payments, nationalizing health care, and more. And if you think this is over the top, go watch and read about Italy and get back to me in 2.5 weeks. I can't wait for the rest of America to understand just what a precarious and fragile system we've built.
Fragile systems are generally built using single points of failure. Centrally planned solutions are generally rife with them. I will trust the robustness of a system made up of 327.7M individual plans then the command solutions you are suggesting. We will fair much better than Italy even if the disease is more widespread here.
That's not likely. Italy has more hospital capacity per capita than we do [1], has lower cost hospital care, and has been more proactive about testing (almost 8x tests performed) [2]. More beds means less strain when things get bad. Lower costs means people don't wait to get care when needed. More testing means we know where to dedicate resources.
The US is flying blind with a fragmented, expensive medical system that discourages those who need care or testing from getting that care. What might save us (marginally) is that much of the country is fairly rural, and we're far less dense so the spread rate might be lower. However strictly none of the doctors I've spoken to (one of whom is an infectious disease specialist at SF General) believes we have the capacity to deal with the crisis. To a person they say that if it starts spiraling in the US it will get very bad, very fast.
By the way, those countries or areas that avoided the worst of it (Taiwan, Singapore, several provinces in China outside Wuhan, to a limited extent South Korea) have taken centralized, planned, dramatic action to do so. This is one place where central planning is probably the better choice.
Not to delve too deeply into this, but I believe you're factually incorrect about the hospital capacity of Italy versus the United States. What matters in the number of critical care beds because they have the equipment available such as a ventilator. A study from 2012 has Italy at 12.5 beds per 100k people, which puts them at the high end of middle for Europe. For example, Germany has 29.2 per 100k according to that study, which is more than double. The United States has 34.9 per 100k people in 2009 [2] and I believe that number has continued to go up. Also, to be clear, a better number is probably number of critical care beds per 100k of people over 65 due to how more likely they are to be affected. I don't know the current number for Italy, but the United States according to the link above is at 189.4.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. What interests me most is does the US have the infrastructure in place to ramp up production as needed? While Italy might have to "place an order" for more ventilators, there is at least one if not more companies in the United States that can manufacture them. Staffing nurses and doctors might be the bottleneck in the US, not the specialty equipment. ICU travel nursing in NYC is already up to 20k+/mo in pay and that number is steadily going up.
My understanding that a number of things contribute to this difficulty:
- What are the number of critical care beds in the hospital?
- What are the number of negative pressure rooms in the critical care unit? Negative pressure rooms help keep a contagion contained.
- Critical care rooms typically have a ventilator, but they require a critical care physician to determine the correct parameters for the vent and a respiratory therapist (RT) to set and monitor the vent
- Does the critical care physician have the appropriate personal protective clothing (PPC)? I believe the norm is some kind of suit along with an N95 mask. I'm not sure if this disease has something extra required.
Mostly, I mention this because the equation of what is necessary is complex and breakdowns in this can cause problems. For example, if there's not enough PPC, then the RT and physician can become ill, which means they can't treat patients. At least in the U.S., critical care is a fellowship on top of a residency, so you can't exactly replace them quickly. If there are not enough negative pressure rooms, then the disease can spread more easily in the hospital.
Now, that said, I don't know enough about Italy and their system to fully explain what happened there. I do know that it's not as simple as number of hospital beds, which is why I replied in the first place. This makes a direct comparison to the U.S. at best difficult.
Anyway, there's a lot of dramatically incorrect information being thrown around. There's a lot of people claiming to be physicians and saying some really hyperbolic things. I'm not happy about that, so my small contribution is to at least provide a better reference for something concrete, which is number of ICU beds in the U.S. and elsewhere within the last decade.
I mean, I don't know the OP's intention here but I think they're probably right, all of these actions will have an economic impact. It's not a statement about whether or not we should or shouldn't do something, I think we need to take lots of big proactive measures, but big proactive measures have lots of collateral damage that isn't negligible. Economic impact will be felt by everyone, from the top to the bottom of the income ladder, so that's also a legitimate pain point...
I mean sure, I don't think I would disagree with any of that at all (good luck with the last part though, we've been trying that for 40 years), but to say that this wouldn't have a detrimental impact on the economy is a bit confusing to me...it will and that will hurt, but the idea is that it will hurt less than something like COVID running rampant or without measures to protect workers who will be hurt most by the economic fallout.
There’s nothing hilarious about the situation, and your friends without shifts are exactly what OP was concerned about. There are hundreds of thousands of households relying on March Madness pay they won’t be getting. When I read your comment, it seems to me overly jerk-ish for no reason.
Just looking at sports trickle-down economic impact in a vacuum, imagine all the other industries that will have similar consequences. Ones that aren't even visible to the average person but highly impactful on our daily lives.
We're going to have to take special measures to make sure critical supply chains stay in tact.
Devastating news. It’s sad enough that the NBA season was stopped, but the NCAA tourney is often the high-water mark and finale for most of its players’ careers. But it’s a wise decision nonetheless; I’m surprised it was decided before a player or coach was diagnosed with covid19
And a psychological impact. It would have been a very welcome distraction for me. I realize there are many people who won't notice it is missing but quite a few people would have had a nice way to distract themselves while socially isolating themselves at home. It is a shame we waited so long to take action to prevent the spread of covid19 in the USA that this became necessary given the risks we face.
I agree, it’s one of the things about pandemics I hadn’t realized, at all. Other disasters and emergency situations still have their bread and circuses, and I miss it.
I've felt a huge shift in public opinion in the US this week. People are finally taking this seriously. With the federal government's inept response, it's a ray of hope to see private institutions take such large measures to keep a lid on this.
unfortunately, this has caused some in the circle i know (mid-sized midwest city) to double down on stupid. that this is evidence of the hysteria and (not to get too political) some type of ploy to destabilize the economy and election. lol. what fun times we live in...
How bad does it have to be to fit in the "serious" vs. "not serious" bucket?
It's like a rather bad influenza. The mortality rate is fairly low and difficult to estimate unless you test the entire population on a regular basis. It isn't like one of the outbreaks that kills 10%, 20%, 50% of the infected.
It shouldn't be ignored, but it also shouldn't be treated like a new black death. It is difficult for uninformed people to say "people are overreacting to a real threat".
> It isn't like one of the outbreaks that kills 10%, 20%, 50% of the infected.
That's true, but it has one characteristic that makes it very nasty: it is highly contagious before you show any symptoms. That makes it very hard to contain. So we only have two options: either try to contain it despite the difficulty, or just give up, let it spread, and essentially sacrifice 1% of the world's population. 1% is better than 10% of course, but that's still 70 million people.
The fatality rate, and the rate at which people need intensive care, is 20-40 times that of the flu. If the fatality rate is 3%, and it affects half the US, that's 5 million dead from the disease alone. If it affects half the world, that's 100 million dead. Some estimates peg it as high as 4.8%.
In addition to all of the people it's going to kill, it will also decimate the world's intensive care resources. Many people who would otherwise die will live because they got a bed in intensive care. Conditions which complete for these ICU beds will see their fatality rate sky rocket.
It's not the fatality rate you need to look at but the R0 and transmission mechanisms.
The bad-case version of this isn't people dying in the streets of the virus, it's people dying needlessly (some in the streets) of preventable things because the healthcare system is completely log jammed and there are literally no more beds and no more staff available. This basically what Italy is staring at, currently.
"It's like a rather bad influenza."
This is quite likely dangerously obtuse; we won't know for sure for a while.
it kills a low percentage but it infects a high percentage. So total deaths + seriously ill MAY be equal to a more lethal disease that is less infectious.
Other sports, too. My favorite, Formula 1 racing, is in trouble. The MacLaren team withdrew from sunday's first-in-season Australian GP after a team member tested positive for coronavirus, and there are unconfirmed rumors that the whole race will be canceled. (F1.com isn't saying that yet, but one of the top drivers, Sebastian Vettel, said in a news conference that drivers would "pull the handbrake" on the race if they didn't feel safe.)
The upcoming Chinese GP is being rescheduled, and the first-ever Vietnam GP might also fall victim. Bahrain GP is scheduled for Mar 22, so if Australia gets canceled, Bahrain probably will too.
This is a huge and extremely expensive sport, one of the most popular and lucrative in the world, with teams shipping dozens of personnel and many tons of equipment all over the world. The logistics are a nightmare if it gets changed.
When Duke and Kansas said they were dropping out of the tournament it was over. I bet the NCAA was still trying to figure out if they could still play without fans in attendance. But once the Blue Bloods left, they knew it was done.
hate it for the folks and families directly impacted but it is the safe decision. it does make you think about how much of this is temporary and how much results in sustained, macro level changes.
let's say many countries, companies and individuals "get used" to how we will need to live over the next weeks/months. what things that we used to take as "norms" may change, permanently, and what would the second and third order effects be?
for example, let's say travel-centric entertainment (sports, concerts etc) became more of an online experience than it already is, and WFH becomes more prevalent. now many folks with "discretionary income and time" theoretically have "extra" time and/or money. where would it go?
would we invest some of it into people and companies that are seeking to improve things for the people that don't have discretionary income/time? would we invest some of it in healthcare, biotech, etc. designed to try to prevent future similar events? or would a variant of parkinson's law just swallow it?
There are a _lot_ of things we can do to prevent and prepare for the next pandemic that have nothing to do with curtailing freedoms. Let's focus on those.
But... but... now I don't have anything to watch while I'm quarantined!
Seriously, it's a bit of a bummer. I had hopes that this year a non-power-conference team (Gonzaga, San Diego State, Dayton) could win it all. I know there are bigger issues to worry about, but it's still a disappointment.
They've already announced there will be no fans at the next two scheduled races. There are still hundreds to thousands of people that work directly for Nascar and all the racing teams, and they haven't mentioned anything about cutting those numbers down as far as I've seen.
How about we start by reserving the word "exploitation" for situations people cannot easily get up and walk away from? And not situations that people dream of, and struggle very hard to achieve?
That's a nice fantasy you are having, but for the elite athletes in the money sports, the scholarship has nothing whatever to do with an academic degree.
That presents a big problem because athletes are also living a fantasy where they all imagine going pro. Less than 1% of college football players go pro! Same order of magnitude for college basketball players.
You might be conflating college athletes with high school and middle school athletes.
By the time you reaches college, you typically:
1. have enough data to see how quickly you're improving;
2. are exposed to a much wider pool of talent than you were previously. Chances are there are many people at your level of athletics that are far better than you; and
3. are exposed to a much more difficult environment than high school and middle school. Combined with 1 and 2, many athletes lose the desire to work that hard for so long.
For athletes that aren't in the upper tier of college athletics, reality has set in even earlier.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of student athletes are not elite athletes that will go on to play professionally. There are only sixty players drafted to the NBA each year, even at powerhouse schools like Duke, most players on the team know that they're not going to play professionally.
Probably wouldn't be many who would take advantage of such an offer. Basketball players are much more likely to enter the NBA draft before graduation than football players are. The coaches of those that aren't good enough to be drafted likely are ready to use that scholarship slot for someone new. There may be a small number of players who are better than any recruit but not good enough to be drafted but not enough to make a policy around.
So, bragging rights? Not exactly worth staying in school for an entire year for that. And what's the guarantee they actually get to play in the tournament next year?
Whoever came up with the term “student athlete” when talking about slaves in college is a genius!
I like to think if that term never existed then maybe society wouldn’t let universities exploit them for millions of dollars while paying them nothing.
I see you removed your earlier racist comment about student athletes being slaves and decided to double down and write it again. So I’ll double down too - you should be banned for this comment.
The compensation model for college athletics is problematic but the entire system is voluntary. You diminish the evilness of slavery by trivializing it by equating it to college students playing a game of their own free will.
Except the NCAA tournament has been around since 1939 and never been canceled. Neither has the NIT, which started in 1938 and was considered the preeminent tournament until the 50’s.
So really, what’s decided regarding eligibility will set the precedent going forward. Hopefully it won’t ever have to be referenced though.
Why not instead cancel the live audience, but keep the tournament? Play the games in empty stadiums, but televise them. And test the players before each game starts.
Everything is going virtual now anyway, sports might as well too. That also maintains at least some of the ad revenue and other economic activity while still greatly minimizing risk of spreading the outbreak.
There are apparently no synchronous tests (e.g. antibody tests) in the US currently. Asynchronous tests (PCR) are hard to come by, and take 3 hours to run with a 2-3 day lead time at best.
good. this country spends too much of people's money and attention on this nonsense. maybe we can make this permanent.
it is insane that one can get into a college with zero brain power just for being tall (and ncaa and co enable that). what possible use does society have for that long term?
That's a bad way of looking at it. First of all, sports are entertaining. There's a reason why people like it. Second, no one gets there without hard work. For every kid that makes it to college basketball, there are probably hundreds of others that didn't make it even high school basketball from the under 10s.
> this country spends too much of people's money and attention on this nonsense
Are you also against TV, movies, video games, reading fiction, etc.? God forbid people spend their money on entertainment. I'm not even a basketball fan, but I can recognize that your comment is absolutely ridiculous.
> can get into a college with zero brain power just for being tall
The real risk isn't with the players -- the real risk is that if you have someone (spectator, foodservice worker, officail, etc.) who's been infected, but hasn't yet shown any symptoms, they're interacting with a ton of other people in a short span in an uncontrolled way. It's a huge potential driver for community spread.
The kids playing are the least at risk. It’s their fellow passengers, people they meet and who serve their food, clean their hotel rooms, fans, etc who are at risk.
This hurts a lot for some of us. I am a Creighton fan and this was our first big year in a long time, maybe our best of all time.
Sports fans get accused of forgetting "it is all a game" sometimes. It is certainly more than a game when you think of how much some people's lives depend on the money from these events, but limiting the impact of this virus is certainly not "soft".
Same with me and BYU. We had potential for the best tournament run since Jimmer Fredette, and we’ll likely end the year #1 in men’s volleyball with no championship to play for. (Our last title win was in 2003.)
Will teams that finish #1 in various polls claim national titles?
Of course none of it matters that much in the long run but it is a big bummer for the athletes and fans!
I really don't think I should be having to make this comment, but it's not the flu. You know it's not the flu, we all know it's not the flu. Please stop trolling.
The decision is not about the players, it's much bigger than that.
It was also the players' choice to make their life about something that was always going to lose in priority to public health, if it ever came to that.
Great majority of cases are asymptomatic, great majority of symptomatic cases are very mild possibly indistinguishable from common cold so people may be inclined to ignore it. So, it's not safe to have any gatherings of this scale since inevitably many people will be infected.
Is it actually true that the great majority are asymptomatic? I know the great majority of cases (currently, in the US) are untested, but they might very well be symptomatic.
Also, is it true that the great majority are as mild as the common cold? I ask just because I heard "mild" encompasses "feels like death but doesn't need hospitalization", like the kind of cold I've had perhaps twice in my life.
(Asking from the point of view of being all-in-favor of canceling large gatherings, to protect the folks that would be hit hard by the illness.)
