The COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly the recent spread of the Omicron variant, has led to a lot of impacts across sports, including in college basketball. The latest one saw a tournament championship game canceled. That would be the Diamond Head Classic in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the Vanderbilt Commodores-Stanford Cardinal title game Saturday was canceled following COVID-19 issues for the Cardinal:
The Hawaiian Airlines Diamond Head Classic championship game between Stanford and Vanderbilt has been canceled due to health and safety protocols within the Stanford program.https://t.co/WGZpgPaavs
— Vanderbilt Men's Basketball (@VandyMBB) December 26, 2021
Word here in Honolulu is that Vanderbilt will be presented the Diamond Head Classic championship trophy, with Stanford pulling out of the title game.
— Greg Wrubell (@gregwrubell) December 26, 2021
Diamond Head Classic tournament officials confirmed that Vanderbilt will indeed be declared the champion of the tournament.
For what it’s worth.
— Justin Hershey (@justinhershey26) December 26, 2021
This is the second Hawaii-based event to go down in the last two days, as the Christmas Eve Hawaii Bowl was canceled less than 24 hours before kickoff following COVID-19 issues for the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors. (Sadly, this one did not come with a delightful social media filibuster for a non-played game.) The Rainbow Warriors’ basketball team also wound up withdrawing from this Diamond Head Classic event after two games over COVID-19 and injury issues, not playing the seventh-place game Saturday. We’ll see what impacts COVID-19 has on the college basketball season going forward, but it’s certainly affected a lot of games and events so far.
[ESPN; photo from @DiamondHeadClsc on Twitter]
