By BRUCE LOWITT
After discovering that one of the three-point lines at Moda Center in Portland, Oregon, was improperly measured, the NCAA suspended the entire Women’s Basketball Tournament after more discrepancies were discovered, including the fact that the games played in Portland, Oregon, were supposed to be played in Portland, Maine.
“Or possibly Portland, Arkansas; or Portland, New York; or Portland, Michigan; or Portland, Tennessee; or … look, we screwed up, okay?” said Amy Reis, director of NCAA women’s basketball.
“There’s, like, fifteen or twenty Portlands and the NCAA people who booked the schedule forgot to put in which state,” Reis said. “Turns out it was the same bunch who outfitted the weight room and set up the coronavirus tests for our 2021 Covid ‘bubble’ tournament.
“Now I’ve got a shitload of lawsuits on my desk from Portlands who say they paid good money to host the tournament and are sitting there with empty arenas, not to mention bills to pay their organizers,” she added.
The suspension of scheduled games and reversal of games already played comes on the heels of what Lynn Holzman, vice president of NCAA women’s basketball said was “a tip-of-the-iceberg thing, meaning that business about how there was a nine-inch difference in the distance of the three-point lines at Moda Center.”
“There were a few more, uh, problems we discovered after that when we did our research over the weekend,” Holzman said. “For instance, when Belmont beat Ball State, a postgame analysis revealed the teams were actually playing with Nerf basketballs.
“We might have caught it before the game but, come on. I mean, it was Belmont and Ball State. Jeez, you can’t expect the NCAA to have anyone important at a game with no spectators.” Also, she said, Stony Brook was mistakenly awarded its win over James Madison “because Seawolves coach Ashley Langford told the referee that Madison’s been dead for, like, a hundred and eighty years and he fell for it.”
In order to “validate” the tournament, Holzman said, the field has been pared down to the top four teams and they’ll play four round-robin games in the coming week with the championship game next Tuesday night, April 9, in prime time.
“And all the games will be played in the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Utah,” Holzman added. “We were thinking of holding it in Washington, but there’s like thirty of them, and twenty-eight Clevelands, and sixteen Bostons and so on. But there’s only one Salt Lake City, so there’s no way we’re going to screw that up, right?”
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