Vitale? Bilas? Lunardi? Pomeroy? Their March with no Madness a different way of life.
Of people seemingly synonymous with college basketball in general and the NCAA Tournament in particular, the cancellation of March Madness probably rocked Joe Lunardi’s world the most.
“Somehow, since I’ve been home, we’ve gotten two cars and a dog,” ESPN’s suddenly idle bracketologist said the day after what would have been Selection Sunday.
Lunardi explained. The leases on the cars he and his wife drive would expire at the end of March.
“We thought maybe we should go take care of that while the dealers are still dealing,” he said.
Lunardi and his wife leased new cars on Saturday of last weekend.
Two days earlier, Lunardi got a text message from his wife saying she and their daughter were at an animal shelter.
“So, here I am talking to you with Sammy on my lap,” Lunardi said.
Sammy is a Bichon Frise, which Lunardi described as “little puff ball.”
Not exactly the kind of macho dog you might expect from a seer of NCAA Tournament seeding and bracketing.
As Lunardi explained it, his wife is a one-seed in the marriage and he is a 16-seed.
“Let’s just say she’s undefeated,” he said. “And you throw in the daughter, I’ve got no shot.”
With college campuses closing in reaction to the coronavirus, Lunardi said he saw the wisdom of canceling the NCAA Tournament. Survive and advance takes on a more sobering connotation.
“I think I felt a little relieved … ,” he said. “I’m just very mindful of the fact that I work in the toy department, relatively speaking. If the toy department has to be closed for a while, that stinks. But, thousands of thousands of people have it way worse. And I’m not going to complain.”
Dick Vitale, who has been commenting on college basketball since the launch of ESPN in 1979 (and who coached for more than 20 years prior to that), said he was especially sympathetic to Cinderella teams like Dayton and Rutgers. Rutgers was set to play in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1991. That chance is now gone.
“There’s no three weeks that capture America like the run to the Final Four,” he said. “You’ve got grandma and grandpa and people who follow basketball all year putting on sweatshirts and developing an allegiance with a certain school. And it is special.”
Then Vitale added, “The safety of our people has got to be the No. 1 priority.”
As for himself, Vitale said he is bored. Given his keen interest in baseball, it’s a double dose of boredom. He said he recently ripped up tickets he bought for spring training games.
“I’m totally bored,” he said. “Because without sports, I am lost.”
Stats savant Ken Pomeroy voiced mixed feelings about the absence of the NCAA Tournament.
“I haven’t really felt totally crushed … ,” he said. “It obviously had to get canceled. I’m sort of numb at this point.”
Pomeroy said he consults for an NBA team and will spend time evaluating possible draft picks.
Fran Fraschilla, another of ESPN’s college basketball analysts, said he sensed a “shared misery” among fans of the game.
To fill his time, Fraschilla said he had begun watching the television show “Billions,” and was halfway through the book “Vicksburg: Grant’s Campaign That Broke the Confederacy,” by Donald L. Miller. Fraschilla described himself as a “Civil War nut” and a “General Grant nut.”
The TV show and the book will help him get through what would have been the Final Four weekend, Fraschilla said.
“This will be the longest I’ve ever been away from the game since I was a high school kid,” he said.
The advice to self quarantine and keep a social distance from others in hopes of containing the coronavirus pandemic has had ESPN analyst Jay Bilas thinking of his grandmother.
“I used to tease my grandmother about using a tea bag over and over until she couldn’t squeeze another ounce of tea out of it,” he said. “And I thought, you don’t have to do that. But, it didn’t register to me as a kid that my grandmother had lived through the 1918 flu pandemic. She lived through the Great Depression. She lived through World War II when there was rationing that went on for years.
“And we’re asking the Selection Committee to put out a phony bracket for us? To me, it’s laughable when you think about it that way.”
Bilas, who also works at a law firm, is spending more time at home. “I think my dog is looking at me going, ‘What are you doing here?’” he said. The law offices are closed. Mail is scanned and sent to lawyers electronically.
“We can toughen up and deal with this,” Bilas said, “because there’s a lot greater concerns out there than we don’t have a bracket to look at and we don’t have a tournament to bet on and talk about and watch. This is a global pandemic.”
