Entire 2021 NCAA Tournament Likely To Be Held In Indianapolis

INDIANAPOLIS — Consider it a matter of March Madness meeting Hoosier Hysteria, but the Big Dance, it appears, is coming home to Indiana.

Citing ongoing concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, the NCAA announced this week that the entire 2021 NCAA Tournament will be held in Indianapolis. The move comes eight months after this year’s NCAA Tournament was canceled just as the pandemic was beginning, which abruptly ended the college basketball championship dreams of contenders and Cinderella stories alike.

NCAA officials said this week that they have entered talks with city and state officials to host the 68-team event, creating a “controlled environment” that officials said would be different than the bubble-like environment that the NBA and NHL used for their respective seasons this year. The annual rite of spring is traditionally held in cities across the United States and was scheduled to take place across 13 locations next year before the NCAA decided to move the event to Indiana.

Indianapolis was already slated to host the Final Four in 2021, which is the eighth time the city has crowned the college basketball champion. Lucas Oil Stadium has hosted the city's two most recent Final Fours in 2010 and then again 2015 when Duke defeated Wisconsin 68-63.

"We have learned so much from monitoring other successful sporting events in the last several months, and it became clear it's not feasible to manage this complex championship in so many different states with the challenges presented by the pandemic," NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt said this week in an NCAA news release.

Gavitt said unlike a bubble, where everything would take place in one venue, moving the tournament to a one state will still require multiple gyms, hotels and other accommodations because of the number of teams involved. He said that health officials will monitor the comings and goings of participants to limit the spread of the virus.

This year marked the first time that the NCAA Tournament had not been held since 1939. NCAA officials said at the time that they hoped for the tournament to return as planned in 2021 but have been forced to keep their optimism in check as positive cases of the coronavirus have begun to soar again over the past six weeks across the country.

Mitch Barnhart, the chair of the NCAA’s men’s basketball committee, said this week that the committee did not take the decision to move the tournament to a single location lightly, which means that several universities and cities would lose out on revenue that would have been generated by hosting tournament games. However, after the NCAA lost an estimated $450 million in TV money with the cancellation of the tournament this year, the decision to move the event to a single location began to take hold with NCAA officials.

According to John Feinstein, a best-selling author who has written several books about college basketball and is a regular at the Final Four, Gavitt created a committee that includes several coaches including Michigan State's Tom Izzo, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, Villanova's Jay Wright and others, that has been meeting since the summer. The intent, Feinstein told Patch on Thursday, was to create a scenario to hold a season with the understanding that the end result had to be the season ending with a tournament, unlike in 2020.

When the committee started meeting by Zoom, Feinstein said, the NCAA applied for the trademark "Battle In The Bubble" knowing, that one way or another, if college basketball was to be played heading into 2021, the season would finish with a tournament - no matter what format it took on. Coaches decided that after the way the 2020 season ended so abruptly, 2021 would not look the same.

While other top sporting events, including the Kentucky Derby, World Series and The Masters, all eventually were completed, albeit delayed because of the pandemic, the NCAA Tournament remains the only major event to be canceled since the pandemic began, which created a shock value when the NCAA was forced to cancel the event.

"It's part of everybody's March and it just went away," Feinstein said Thursday. "All the teams that had played 30-35 games to get to the point where they were going into Selection Sunday, it was all for nothing."

Now, with a plan set to host the tournament in one location next spring, the NCAA has its wish although officials realize that it will look much different than normal.

"It will be a very controlled environment," Gavitt told reporters this week. "It'll be different; it'll be historic; and it'll be hopefully something we all treasure and experience just once, hopefully not ever again."