CHAMPAIGN — Plan on a 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament taking place.

That’s straight from the top. Even if college basketball teams have had players test positive for COVID-19 in the past five months. Illinois among them (more on that later).

Dan Gavitt, NCAA vice president of men’s basketball and as much a college basketball czar as anybody, has made it clear every effort will be made to ensure last year’s cancellation was an anomaly.

To get there? That’s going to require some version of a 2020-21 season. Opposite the scattershot approach college football took in advance of what’s now a mess of a fall season, there’s a plan for college basketball.

The oversight committees for Division I men’s and women’s basketball are working in concert with Gavitt. The National Association of Basketball Coaches — led since mid-July by former Oregon State coach and President Barack Obama’s brother-in-law Craig Robinson — is involved, too. Gavitt has promised an initial status update on the season in mid-September.

“We recognize that we are living and operating in an uncertain time, and it is likely that mid-September will be just the first milestone for many important decisions pertaining to the regular season and the NCAA basketball championships,” Gavitt said in a statement released this past Monday.

“While circumstances may warrant flexibility resulting in a different and perhaps imperfect season, the ultimate goal is to safely provide student-athletes and teams with a great college basketball experience.”

That experience? At least for the 2020-21 season? Think bubble. Probably bubbles plural. It’s maybe the only way the NCAA tournament in 2021 happens.

Underwood on board

The Basketball Tournament was the first to prove basketball in a bubble worked, pulling off a two-week tournament in early July in Columbus, Ohio. The NBA and WNBA have done the same at their respective sites in Florida. Other successful bubbles have been operated by the NWSL (the first league to do it), MLS and NHL.

Sports outside of a bubble have faced more challenges. Outbreaks for both the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals marred the beginning of the MLB season, with positive tests on the Reds and Mets disrupting their seasons — and other MLB teams.

College football has fractured before even getting started, with the Big Ten and Pac-12 on one side not playing and SEC, ACC and Big 12 on the other still set on taking the field this fall.

A bubble could be college basketball’s best shot. And count Illinois men’s basketball coach Brad Underwood as 100 percent on board with the idea.

“No doubt,” he told The News-Gazette this week. “TBT’s proved it. The NBA’s proved it. We’ve proved it this summer in our form of a bubble. … Why do I believe there’s going to be basketball? You’ve got the head, Dan Gavitt, telling you there’s going to be. Saying there’s going to be a tournament. We have the ability to work toward that and believe that. Dan’s a bright guy. I know how important college basketball is to him. There’s 100 percent belief in what they’re doing and what they’re saying.”

College basketball is currently leaning on what would be a natural bubble created when universities across the country, Illinois included, close up shop for in-person learning in late November for an extended break running through Thanksgiving, Christmas and into January. That creates a parallel to what teams have experienced this summer isolated on campus and is no different than a normal season when teams practice and play during the holiday break in a non-pandemic year.

“That becomes a basketball bubble,” Underwood said. “Do we take it the next step and literally go to sites and stay there for two weeks? Maybe. Possibly. I think anything’s on the table. I think we’re going to play basketball, and I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”

Testing is imperative

CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein called the window between the end of November and into January a “golden opportunity” for college basketball to showcase its sport.

The NBA would likely just be spinning into gear with a start to its own 2020-21 not expected before Dec. 1 at the earliest, and whatever remains of the college football season will also have mostly concluded.

“The window between the end of that fall semester is being viewed as a golden window to get games in,” Rothstein said. “We’re going to need inventory, obviously, to have an NCAA tournament and to seed the NCAA tournament. The criteria for seeding is always very contingent on what you do in your nonconference schedule.

“It’s clear there’s a concerted effort on a daily basis to put together a plan that, for all intents and purposes, gives college basketball a canvas to paint on. Not just for the NCAA tournament, but before that. Are there going to be setbacks along the way? Sure, but I think everybody can go to bed right now each and every night and wake up with the feeling we’re going to have a tournament next year.”

Health and safety protocols, of course, will drive any college basketball bubble discussion. Social distancing and mask wearing matters in terms of getting the number of COVID-19 cases under control. Progress has been made, though, on an even more crucial front. Two different saliva tests for the novel coronavirus — one developed by the University of Illinois and the other an NBA-backed test from Yale — have received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. A quicker turnaround on results could be a game-changer for sports.

“You’re looking at an inexpensive way to test and get results back in a day,” Underwood said. “That can improve a lot of things. … As the testing gets better, you hope you can handle contact tracing in a different light.”

TBT offers blueprint

Let’s go back almost two months, to the first basketball bubble created and embarked upon in the U.S. amid the pandemic: TBT. The 24-team tournament, whittled down from its initial field of 64 teams, was ultimately able to get its testing turnaround down to 18 hours. TBT founder and CEO Jon Mugar said a shorter timeframe would make creating a basketball bubble environment much easier. Testing, of course, is just one side of the bubble coin. Buy in from players, coaches and staff to follow protocols and do the right thing is the other.

“Any plan will only go so far if people desire to make it work and are willing to sacrifice,” Mugar said. “A lot of that comes down to behavior and what they’re doing away from the court. It’s easy enough to control people when they’re on site in a hotel in a secure environment where they can’t leave and nobody can enter.

“Can they be contained and their behavior be controlled outside of that? Especially within 14 days of an event, how much can that be controlled? The answer to whether or not it can be pulled off lies in that question.”

This year’s TBT operated with few issues. A few teams were eliminated following positive tests in the bubble, but that was a necessity out of the tournament’s limited playing schedule. Former Illinois guard Mike LaTulip, who made his TBT coaching debut with Illini alumni squad House of ‘Paign, said the $1 million prize was certainly an incentive, but his team bought in because of the opportunity to simply play competitive basketball after a nearly four-month layoff.

“The question with college basketball comes in how incentivized are these players to do the right thing?” LaTulip said. “How important is it to them to stay on the straight and narrow? If you have a great culture, you can pull it off. If you have guys that kind of want to go and do their own thing, it becomes that much more difficult.”

The Illinois basketball team operated in a quasi-bubble this summer after the team began returning to campus in June. Underwood said it proved the safety of the testing and other health and safety protocols.

It didn’t go off without a hitch, though.

“Have we had a positive test?” Underwood said. “Yes. Did guys go to quarantine? Yes. I chose not to shut the program down, but use it as an educational piece. Guys know what quarantine is like. Guys know if you test positive what is going to happen. We have living proof of that. When you do things right, we’ve had a great month.”

Dosunmu weighs in

Ayo Dosunmu was the last of the Illini to arrive on campus. The junior guard made his decision the night of July 31 to eschew the NBA draft and return for another season with the Illini. He did so even with uncertainty surrounding the 2020-21 season. A bubble seems a possible path, but a season happening is not set in stone.

“It doesn’t scare me, but it’s definitely a possibility,” Dosunmu said. “Everything I’ve been hearing — all signs — is worst case we would play conference games only. … Seeing those two leagues (TBT and NBA) be successful has definitely given me hope that worst case scenario we would play in the Big Ten and beat up on each other. With the team we have, I’m more excited about enjoying the whole season. I don’t want to have it just anchored down to the Big Ten.”

Mugar and his staff spent approximately 3 1/2 months on the TBT bubble plan. Risk was evaluated, but not eliminated. The decision to move forward with the tournament meant accepting that risk, but also finding ways to mitigate it.

“It’s really hard to apply health and safety to an existing format,” Mugar said. “It’s a lot easier to apply a format to health and safety. If you can rethink the format and how teams play and compete and the timing on which they do that, it’s remarkably doable.”

LaTulip’s advice for college basketball is to learn from what worked in the TBT bubble and what’s still working in the NBA bubble in Orlando, Fla., and the WNBA “wubble” in Bradenton, Fla. A successful bubble, he said, is predicated on what is valued most. Health and safety still has to trump simply getting games in because they’re necessary for an NCAA tournament at some point in 2021.

“You have to have conversations with those organizations,” LaTulip said. “I don’t think this is a time to try to do anything super nuanced or risky. There’s been a blueprint that’s worked, so do your best to follow that. … Being able to mirror the organizations that have done it successfully is really where I think college basketball will be able to pull it off.”