The oral history of the 2020 SEC Tournament cancellation

Part IV: The SEC Tournament is canceled

PART I: COVID discussions leading up to the tournament
PART II: COVID news spreads further, fan attendance gets canceled
PART III: Rudy Gobert’s test leads to sports cancellations
PART IV: The SEC Tournament is canceled
PART V: The NCAA Tournament is canceled

With the attendance limitation and the Rudy Gobert news, momentum was building in a threatening direction. Finally, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey announced on Thursday that the SEC Tournament was canceled. Coaches had to pack up and leave with their teams after preparing for the tournament, and then had to wonder if the NCAA Championships would be canceled as well.

Jimmy Dykes, ESPN/SEC Network analyst: It got to 9:30, 10 o’ clock in the morning, and we are supposed to be at the arena by 10:30 for a noon tip. We got to the arena and started hearing through our producer, from different people, that there’s discussions right now about the SEC Tournament being canceled.

Allen Greene, athletic director, Auburn: All the ADs are huddled up in the Omni in Nashville, and the commissioner stepped out to make a call. We all just stopped and watched him walk back in and sit down, watching his emotion we could tell that things weren’t going well. He shared with us that the tournament was canceled. All of us immediately called our coaches.

Morgan Weinbrecht, associate director, Turner Sports:  I think for the most part, a lot of schools were very divided. I think some coaches were like, “This is crazy. You can’t take this away from these student athletes.” And then there were some people that were like “I’ve already canceled practice. The athletes are not allowed to play. I’m sending them home.”

Devan Cambridge, guard, Auburn men’s basketball: I saw BP (Bruce Pearl) get up and walk to the back of the bus and was like “I got some bad news for y’all, with COVID rising they’re planning on shutting down the tournament.”

Greene: I was trying to rationalize what was actually happening, knowing that we are not medical professionals. Trying to apply some rational judgment around a circumstance that is unfamiliar to most. I remember jumping on the team bus and apologizing to them that we couldn’t save the tournament for them and that things were changing rapidly and we’re trying to do what’s best for them.

Dan Leibovitz, associate commissioner for men’s basketball, SEC: There was a sensitivity on letting the coaches know before the public knew. So as I recall, I let the coaches know, then it was an all clear. The understanding was the coaches are going to tell the players and then it wouldn’t be something they read about. They at least heard it from their coach.

Dykes: Around 10:45 [a.m.], we got the official word that the tournament was canceled. Kentucky was, at that point, on the floor practicing because they didn’t play until the night session. We talked to them, I think the Kentucky SID, and told them “This tournament is over.” They went and told Coach Cal [John Calipari], and Cal stopped practice. He circled his guys up and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re getting ready to go back to the hotel, load up our stuff and head back to Lexington and get ready for the NCAA Tournament.”

Leibovitz: I went to Vandy medical, they had this triage emergency COVID area, they had already converted their parking deck into that and I took a test. So I went to bed that night, on Wednesday night, and I didn’t feel great. I was sitting in this parking deck in the morning, this is probably 10 or 11 in the morning. And Greg says we’re not playing. I met with the ADs, we’re canceling the tournament, let the coaches know. I’m sitting in the parking deck in the cold on the concrete waiting for my test back and I text all the head coaches that it’s over.

Adam Sparks, Tennessee Volunteers beat reporter for The Tennessean and USA TODAY Sports: Bridgestone Arena, the staff they use for the SEC Tournament, there’s a lot of overlap between them and the (Nashville) Predators because it’s the same facility. They were compensated for quite a while after that. They essentially found jobs for them. I think they had staff that was cleaning seats end up working in the mail room and marketing department or stuff. They paid them to work in the arena for quite a while despite there not being any games. I give them credit for doing that.

Weinbrecht: Turner and CBS paid every person, so our staff was obviously lucky. Our staff never lost money, they never paused our paychecks through it. The freelancers that are contracted for the event, Turner and CBS paid them their full rate for each day, even though we did nothing and we were all locked in our homes

Dykes: At that point, we all thought all of these conference tournaments will be canceled, but we will still play the NCAA Tournament. Within ,four or five hours we realized that’s not going to be the case either. Karl Ravech and I were actually then thrown on air for ESPN for probably about an hour and they kept coming back and forth to us. We interviewed the SEC commissioner, we weighed in on it ourselves, kind of how the building felt and when the decision went down, our sideline reporter Marty Smith interviewed a couple of coaches.

Then we were sitting at noon in an empty Bridgestone arena. Empty. And at one point, there were only like four people left in the building. It was me and Karl Ravech, our producer and Greg Sankey. He was sitting in the end zone on his phone. I could tell he was going 100 miles an hour on things. But it’s not at all the typical Thursday, what happened. We all scrambled around, went back to our hotel, and flew home. That afternoon, we were all out of there.

Dr. Michael Goodlett, Auburn athletics chief medical officer and team physician, member of SEC Medical Guidance Task Force: The SEC and NCAA were the primary decision makers. They had to consider the CDC guidance while making these decisions, which ultimately led to the decision. Canceling was the right choice because we saw how easily it could spread, and the decision to cancel it was a way to keep everyone safe.

Leibovitz: There was talk of a smaller tournament. And then that just quickly as the days went on, you just realized that it wasn’t happening. But I remember thinking that maybe this, maybe this won’t take a year, maybe this will take a couple weeks, and we’ll reconvene or in the spring and we’ll crown a champion. Then I was just very sad. Really sad for the seniors.

Sparks: It was very much follow-the -leader. I hadn’t thought about it until you just asked it, but it really set the tone that week. Especially in sports, it kind of sets the tone for the next two years.

Dykes: I remember flying home that night and there were maybe, ten people on the flight altogether. No one had tickets to fly home on Thursday. If anything, everybody was flying to Nashville. There weren’t a lot of people there yet. They are on their way and most of them are driving. I just remember I had two flights to make, I went from Nashville to Dallas and Dallas to my home – and both flights were nearly empty. You just start slowly following social media on my flight, start seeing all the things getting canceled. And the NCAA Tournament was canceled on that day. I remember thinking, this is changing our world. I got home and told my wife “This is completely different than anything we’ve gone through.” Like everybody else, you start adjusting to the new way of life for a couple of months when we were all shut down.

Cody Voga, assistant athletics director for athletic communications at Ball State University; Auburn Basketball SID in 2020: What I can remember thinking is basically how do we get back from Nashville to Auburn safely? How do they get us back home? They got us on a plane to get us back that day so we could be back in Auburn right away, and that’s exactly what ended up happening.

Leibovitz: This tournament, we work on it all year. It’s fun. We love it. We love putting on events and we love when our student athletes come in and they feel a great environment. And we have a level of service and we want it to be amazing for them. And I remember thinking that I hated that they weren’t going to be able to do it.

And I remember feeling for Greg. Greg was just totally exhausted, just totally spent. When he broke the news that we were canceling a tournament, I think on TV, he was fighting back tears. I had tears in my eyes when I was texting the coaches. It was very sad.

Steven Pearl, assistant coach, Auburn men’s basketball: So, we’re driving, in the bus, and BP (Bruce Pearl) gets a call from Rich McGlynn who was our associate AD for men’s basketball and basically said “Tournament’s off. They’re canceling the SEC Tournament. We’re not sure about the NCAA Tournament; we just found out the SEC Tournament is canceled.”

BP gets up and he goes to the back of the bus and starts telling the guys, and you know with the hopes of hopefully this thing slows down. We had no idea. COVID was just starting so we didn’t know what the magnitude of it was.

Lior Berman, guard, Auburn men’s basketball: I was pretty disappointed. It’s hard as a freshman to realize, it’s kind of hard to put yourself in the seniors’ shoes, you know, it’s their last year. So, for me, I was like “Man, that’s awful, but at least I have a couple more years.”

Cambridge: It was really tough on [the seniors] because it was their last time to play and be an Auburn Tiger. It really wasn’t as bad for the freshmen because we had more years to play, but it was really hard to see the seniors’ faces. For some it was their ticket out of there, like to play overseas or get better and get higher in the draft.

Pearl: So, guys were crying, guys were super upset in the back of the bus. I can just remember seeing some of our seniors in complete shock, they couldn’t believe what was happening. And we were obviously really looking forward to postseason play because we had just beaten Tennessee by 20 at their place. We felt like we had good momentum going into the postseason to make another Final Four run, win another SEC championship. For all that to just get within a few hours’ time, just get canceled, it was pretty devastating for our seniors and for the rest of our team.

Goodlett: This is a novel virus, and there’s no playbook for playing sports during a pandemic. I believe in most cases we made the correct decisions based on the science at that point in time.

Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University, and member of the NCAA COVID-19 Advisory Panel: This began to look like a virus that could spread very very rapidly and had the potential to make many people sick. The virus had certain characteristics. It was very contagious, and it could spread through people who show no symptoms. …There was a lot of data coming in from the CDC about which groups of people were going to be at risk. We were concerned for anyone involved with the teams who were over the age of 65, and our largest pool of concern was also geared toward ensuring the safety of spectators.

Pearl: We didn’t know if we were going to just take a week off and play next week, we had no idea. We were still hoping the NCAA tournament was still going to happen in some capacity.