- Six foot seven, outta Kansas City, Missouri!
(players cheering)
- [Narrator] This is BYU men's basketball team,
getting hyped for one of their first tests
in this year's NCAA tournament.
A test for the coronavirus.
(upbeat music)
March madness is now underway,
- [Player] I'm back!
- [Narrator] And COVID-19
is the opponent every team is facing.
In the tournament's first weekend
an outbreak on one roster
forced a team to forfeit before even taking the court.
Others have competed without key players.
- The winning team is going to be
that that can keep themselves safe as possible, right?
- [Narrator] But safety isn't just up to the teams.
The NCAA has created so-called controlled environments
in Indianapolis, where the men are playing,
and San Antonio, where the women are.
- In order to pull this off,
the NCAA did what it does best,
which is write lots and lots of rules.
- [Narrator] Last year, the virus put March Madness
and the nearly $900 million in revenue it brings on ice.
So what are the protocols the NCAA put in place
to keep COVID-19 from upending this year's tournament?
And are they working?
(players cheering)
- Last year we knew nothing about this virus.
Now we know a lot. Now we have testing.
Last year, last year,
part of the reason we canceled the tournament
is there wasn't enough testing available
to do the testing we needed to do.
- [Narrator] Much of the NCAA's COVID 19 playbook
centers around testing, quarantining,
masking, and distancing.
Just to enter the controlled environment,
players and coaches were all required
to report seven consecutive days of negative tests.
- I'm in quarantine right now.
- [Narrator] Then upon arrival,
everyone had to complete a 48 hour quarantine.
- We got tested about a hour ago.
- They are getting tested every day.
They don't have roommates in their hotel rooms.
Every floor of the hotel has its own team
and getting to practice
involves a very intricate dance of timing
of you know, who can be in the elevator when,
when they can walk across the lobby.
Everything down to the minutia is thought of.
(player cheers)
- [Narrator] That's because one negative test
has the potential to cause a domino effect.
- [Player] You know that's a bucket!
- [Narrator] Once a player tests positive,
any other player that is deemed as a close contact
will also be required to quarantine,
potentially missing the opportunity to play.
- Some people will say, well, you know,
you're being too cautious.
Absolutely.
I think I'm being cautious
because there's a lot of things are at stake here.
- [Narrator] For the NCAA,
what's at stake is 80% of its annual revenue,
which the association banks on
the men's basketball tournament to bring in.
- [Laine] When the NCAA's revenue gets curtailed,
that means that all of the money
that it gives out to support the athletic departments,
every one of the thousand member institutions
that make up the NCAA,
they also get hurt and they get less money.
- [Narrator] Last year,
the NCAA's distribution to all schools
was projected to be $600 million.
It ended up being just 225 million
after the tournament was canceled
- In order to avoid kind of an existential financial crisis.
the NCAA really made it a priority
to make sure that it could hold the tournament this year
and continue to recoup some of those revenues.
(players cheering)
- [Narrator] For players and coaches,
what's at stake is the chance to be national champions.
A title VCU's men's team lost
before they even took the court.
The team reported multiple positive tests
in the 48 hours proceeding their first round game.
VCU did not specify how many members
were deemed close contacts and thus required to quarantine,
but teams need a minimum of five healthy players to compete.
- This is what you dream of as a college player and a coach
and to get it taken away like this
is, it's just a heartbreaking moment
in, in their, in their young lives.
- We knew that this was going to happen.
There will be teams that you will find
with somebody infected
because there's enough virus transmission in the community
that that was going to be the case.
And unfortunately, you know, we are seeing that.
- [Narrator] But the virus has impacted teams in other ways.
Oklahoma played without its second leading scorer
and defending champions Virginia
lost their first round matchup
after forced quarantines
from an earlier outbreak impacted their practice schedule.
- I think you're going to be continuing
seeing this kind of things.
And I think hopefully teams are going to be
looking at their protocols
and what they're doing and learning from this
and saying, could we do something different?
- While Dr. Del Rio says
the NCAA's COVID protocols are comprehensive,
its controlled environment isn't impenetrable.
- They have to find a way to, you know
not run into trouble with this.
And it's an incredibly unpredictable and contagious virus.
So it's sort of this X factor
that's hanging over every team's tournament runs.
(players cheering)