INDIANAPOLIS – Sports built downtown Indianapolis. Can sports save it from the coronavirus? If we’re lucky – and we’re due some luck, are we not? – we’ll find out over the coming months.

The Indiana Sports Corp is positioning downtown Indianapolis as the best place to hold a college basketball bubble – think the NBA restart in Orlando, but with college teams right here – and soon we’ll find out if it works. The Sports Corp sent a 16-page bubble blueprint on Friday to every college and conference in the country, along with every in-season tournament. The folks at ISC aren’t trying to take anyone’s basketball; they’re trying to save it.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. The Maui Invitational already has relocated to Asheville in late November, but a number of tournaments remain in limbo due to COVID-19 concerns, to say nothing of the actual 2020-21 college basketball season. With the NCAA announcing on Wednesday a Nov. 25 start date, teams are scrambling to build schedules in an amorphous sprint the likes of which we’ve never seen. Teams can play as few as 13 games and be eligible for the 2021 NCAA Tournament, with a maximum of 27 regular-season games.

That’s a big range, with so many questions still being asked, and the Sports Corp doesn’t claim to have the answers. But it’s offering one potential solution:

Big-time basketball where big-time basketball has never before been played – at the Indianapolis Convention Center.

An idea so crazy, it just might work.

Play a sport? Come to Indy

Basketball is the news peg here, the headline, the eye-popping wow that jumps off the page – would the Big Ten hold its entire conference season in three or four chunks of games at the Indianapolis Convention Center? – but basketball isn’t the only sport that can save downtown Indianapolis.

It’s not the only sport that built it, either, though downtown’s renaissance started with the Indiana Pacers, who begat the Indianapolis Colts, which led to the Final Four in men’s basketball being given a regular spot here. The NCAA moving here hasn’t hurt business either.

More: Slick and Nancy Leonard’s love story helped save Pacers, build downtown

At the moment, our 7,100 downtown hotel rooms are going mostly unused. Want a table at a restaurant? Walk in. Odds are, you’ll be fine. The coronavirus has crushed the entertainment industry nationally and right here, but you knew that. The question has been: What will bring it back?

One answer, here: Sports.

Typically, the Sports Corp takes a measured approach to bidding on events. It picks and chooses the events – a calculation that includes dates, sports and event size – that make the most sense. These are not typical times, and the Sports Corp isn’t using a fine-point pen. Try a paint brush, big and fat, the end result a neon sign that reads something like this:

Indianapolis is open for business!

And it is. We have the hotels and the restaurants. We have the convention center. So the Sports Corp has bid on every Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball tournament through 2030. It has the Big Ten football championship game through 2021, but has bid on those through 2030 as well.

And we’re just getting started.

Name an NCAA sport, and the Indiana Sports Corp wants that championship held here: basketball, sure, but also golf, lacrosse, swimming and diving, wrestling, rowing. Did you know the NCAA offers a championship in fencing? Just telling you that, so you’re not alarmed someday if you see dudes walking downtown holding sabers.

As for what NCAA division, the answer is: Yes. All of them. Divisions I, II and III. No sport is too big or too small.

The Sports Corp also is eyeing one-off events like the X Games and NFL Draft. No bids have gone out yet. We’ll see.

How many sports offer a U.S. Olympic Trials? The Sports Corp has done that research and extended those bids. While most of the sports world was on hiatus from mid-March until the NBA bubble opened for business in late July, folks at the Sports Corp were working double time, just on the hope that some of these sports would say yes. What if they all say yes? Good problem to have, and put it this way:

We have the hotel rooms available.

Convention Center is bubble-icious

But you’re here for the basketball, and that is a fascinating development. For starters, ever think you’d see a major conference game in the convention center? Sure, the place is huge – roughly 750,000 square feet, or the equivalent of 17 acres – but … this?

Turns out, according to that 16-page proposal the Sports Corp sent to schools and conferences, the convention center has room for eight courts: two for competition, six for practice.

It’s almost like our convention center was made with a bubble in mind. It is connected by skywalks to 4,700 hotel rooms, more than any convention center in the country. USA Today named Indianapolis the best convention city in America in 2014, and those hotel rooms are one reason. So are the restaurants and other attractions located in our compact downtown. You know all this.

What we’ll learn soon enough, now that the Sports Corp has dropped bait into college basketball’s pond, is the number of bites we get. The Sports Corp was bidding for anything and everything.

“Normally we draw up a blueprint,” Sports Corp president Ryan Vaughn was telling me Friday, between his calls to conference commissioners and college athletic directors. “This is more of a white paper. We just want to get this information out there so people can think about it and make their decisions.

“Our plan,” he says, “is to put it out there that we’re flexible, so when (conferences and tournaments) have to make a decision, they can act quickly and we can meet their needs.”

The convention center is open for 72 days of basketball, in four big chunks (Nov. 25-Jan. 1, Jan. 19-27, Feb. 2-11 and Feb. 12-26). That’s 2½ months of possible games, on two courts, for 10-12 hours a day. That’s a lot of basketball, but as I said, downtown Indy is ready.

“We have the option of devoting an entire hotel – entire hotels – if we get an event with as many as 24 teams,” Vaughn says.

Something like this doesn’t just happen, and it can’t happen in most cities. If me going all ooey-gooey over Indianapolis makes you uncomfortable, take it up with somebody who cares. One of the things our city does better than anyone is become a team, not a group of individual entities, when teamwork is required.

In addition to partnering with Russ Potts Productions to manage the tournaments and Intersport to handle whatever marketing needs arise, the Sports Corp has been in contact with all the major hotels downtown, brought in Ascension St. Vincent to be its medical partner for any basketball events – daily COVID-19 testing, among other things – and has at its disposal its usual army of Central Indiana volunteers.

“This is a classic Indianapolis story,” Vaughn says. “All these partners getting together to see what we can do.”

The end result – the goal – is to help preserve the 2020-21 college basketball season, which starts on Nov. 25 and is scheduled to end on April 3-5 with the Final Four here in Indianapolis. But to get there, college basketball needs to survive November and December, and January and February, and March.

The Sports Corp has sent the word to every school and conference in America:

 Indianapolis is open for business.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.