KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Big 12 Championship is returning to Kansas City this week, which not only highlights an exciting four days for local college basketball fans, but also marks an inauspicious anniversary.
After all, it was this time last year when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Big 12 officials were forced to cancel the tournament with just two games played.
"We certainly hadn't been through anything like this prior to last year," said Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby in a one-on-one interview with 41 Action News.
It was March 12, 2020. The league had played its two first round games the night before with Oklahoma State defeating Iowa State and Kansas State beating TCU.
The Big 12 was going to limit fan attendance for the rest of the tournament and were prepared to take the floor Thursday morning with the quarterfinal games when the decision to cancel the remainder of the tournament was made.
"At that time, there was very little information as to what the virus actually was," Bowlsby said.
Other conferences and eventually the NCAA followed suit in canceling tournaments. Bowlsby said it was the right decision.
"We were subsequently on some calls with Vice President Pence and the Coronavirus Task Force group, and they said on the call that, generally speaking, college basketball probably saved a lot of lives by canceling these events," Bowlsby said.
A year later, the Big 12 is back in Kansas City and COVID-19 remains, albeit with a greater understanding of how the virus works and more people being vaccinated every day.
"We're also trying to do some things that make it less necessary to do isolation and quarantine because we know who they've been around and when they've been around them," Bowlsby said.
Out of a possible 90 Big 12 men's basketball games this season, the league was able to play 80, scheduling in a buffer week at the end to make up as many postponed games as possible.
Four of the league's 10 men's teams got all 18 of their conference games played. The only significant outbreak happened within the Baylor program. The Bears went three weeks in February without playing a game.
"I wish I could state to you that we had a grand plan, but I don't think any of us had the luxury of a plan that you could [call] operational any more than a couple weeks ahead of time," Bowlsby said. "We had to do a lot of pivoting in real time."
Of course, now in the postseason, there's no room to postpone games. If a team can't play due to COVID-19, it will have to forfeit games, potentially ending its season.
That puts a responsibility on Kansas City to keep all basketball teams healthy while they're here.
"We'll test every day during the course of the two tournaments," Bowlsby said.
Bowlsby said the league will "have teams ready to go" to Indianapolis and San Antonio, the sites of the men's and women's NCAA tournaments, when the time comes.
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