It remains to be seen how – or if – college football will unfold in 2020, but CBS Sports college basketball guru Jon Rothstein is extremely confident that an NCAA Tournament will occur in 2021.
“This much I can tell you: We are going to have an NCAA Tournament, and that means we’re going to have college basketball before [that] because there has to be inventory in place to seed an NCAA Tournament,” Rothstein said on The Zach Gelb Show. “This is what I can tell you: The decision-makers, the people of influence, are looking specifically at the window between the latter days of November around Thanksgiving and the early days of January as a pivotal time to get non-conference inventory played.”
Now, how does that happen? What does the format look like? Where will the games be played? Time will tell.
“Nobody really knows,” Rothstein said. “I do know that following the success of the NBA restart in Orlando, one of the the things that I’m hearing is Orlando is being looked at as a unified location where several non-conference tournaments could be played at one venue in a safe situation in a bubble-type scenario. Obviously if you have multiple tournaments going on, two or three days after that tournament is done, you’ll have more teams to potentially play more scheduled games down the road. So there’s a lot of speculating on speculation, but this is something that is not speculating at all. There will be an NCAA Tournament in 2021.”