Did Harvard Start the Coronavirus to Keep Its NIT Streak Alive?

Here’s what we know:

• Entering the 2019-20 men’s college basketball season, only two programs had active NIT streaks: Nebraska and Harvard. Each had made both the 2018 NIT and the 2019 NIT. The pressure was on.
• Sometime around the end of January, it became clear that Nebraska was not going to right the ship and make their third straight NIT. Only Harvard remained alive.
• On Friday, March 6^th, Harvard lost to Brown, eliminating them from the Ivy League title race and therefore the NIT.
• On Tuesday, March 10^th, the Ivy League canceled its conference tournament, which had been slated to be held in Cambridge.
• On Thursday, March 12^th, the NCAA canceled the 2020 NIT. Harvard and Nebraska’s streaks were suddenly alive.

Now, I’m not saying Nebraska and Harvard wanted to kill anybody. Things may have just gotten out of hand. What I am saying is that with the agricultural resources at Nebraska and the brainpower/foreign ties at Harvard, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that these two basketball programs conspired to get the 2020 NIT canceled by developing a highly infectious coronavirus in an animal and placing that animal in Wuhan last fall, giving them the option of using Harvard’s sway over the Ivy League and the Ivy League’s sway over the rest of college basketball to pull the levers if need be and cancel the whole rest of the season.

Of course, it’s also possible Harvard acted alone. It certainly seems they’re acting alone now, having pushed the start of the Ivy League basketball season back to January 1^st at the earliest. This is a development that decidedly helps Harvard’s potential NIT seeding (if there isn’t any nonconference play, Harvard could enter the NIT with something like a 12-4 record and plenty of people thinking they’re better than they are) and decidedly hurts Nebraska’s chances of making the NIT (if the Big Ten only plays conference games, the chances rise that Nebraska gets bit by the “wow, that win-loss record looks very bad because it’s decidedly below .500 even though you’re probably an adequate team” bug).

We’ll continue to monitor this situation and provide updates as available.