Well that didn’t last long.

On Wednesday I wrote about the challenges South Carolina was facing in assembling its non-conference schedule. By Thursday night, the mere idea of a traditional non-conference schedule seemed hopelessly naive.

NCAA president Mark Emmert’s video announcement Thursday evening that the NCAA is canceling fall sports championships was confirming the obvious - aside from the SEC, ACC, and Big 12 still trying to play football, few conferences still planned to try to play fall sports. But Emmert’s announcement contained two important comments on basketball.

First was the acknowledgement that some sort of a bubble for basketball could work. Second, for the first time the NCAA hedged on the timing of the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments. Previously, the NCAA insisted it wanted to hold the tournaments on time, but Emmert conceded they are willing to push them back.

“We'd love nothing more than to hold the current dates constant, and that may well be doable,” he said. “We're hopeful we can do that, but we are looking at alternatives.”

If the tournaments get pushed back, that makes it easier to delay the start of the season. A delayed start already seemed likely. The Pac-12 has already delayed its season until January. Other conferences could easily push their starts back to early December without putting the Pac-12 too far behind. Geno Auriemma, now back in the Big East, has suggested starting the season in January as well, but the NCAA may not want to give up on December. Many colleges are following South Carolina’s lead with no in-person classes after Thanksgiving. That creates a de-facto on campus bubble for players. Whether colleges would want to try to cram in a few games between Thanksgiving and exams might vary, but given much more pressing matters, that shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.

Whatever happens, it seems almost certain that the previously assembled non-conference schedules will be torn up.

Several coaches on the men’s side have suggested mini-bubbles, where a group of teams, likely four, would meet somewhere for a weekend and play round-robin games on Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Kentucky’s John Calipari have advocated for bubbles, with Izzo specifically mentioning weekend round-robins.

Izzo and Calipari, as coaches of blue blood men’s programs, likely had some high-profile, made-for-tv bubbles in mind, but that won’t be the case for women’s basketball (especially if there is spring football competing for tv slots). In some ways, the relatively low profile might make it easier to figure out technicalities like television rights and play women’s basketball in bubbles.

Two things I mentioned Wednesday now seem more likely. One is that the Gamecocks could essentially fill out a schedule with in-state opponents. There will likely be an emphasis on regional bubbles. For example, wouldn’t it make sense to have South Carolina and Clemson host a pair of bubbles in Columbia and Greenville/Clemson, with Coastal Carolina, College of Charleston, Charleston Southern, Winthrop, Furman, Presbyterian, USC Upstate, Wofford, and S.C. State split between the sites? You could put half the teams at each site for a week (I know it’s an odd number, but either somebody drops out or you pick a Division II school to join, or maybe invite Charlotte as a thank you for 2019), and then swap for the next week. (The biggest downside might be that I’d be much more interested in seeing all the state’s men’s teams assemble in Greenville for a round-robin. That would be fantastic.)

The other possibility that now seems more likely than not is that the SEC or NCAA takes over scheduling. It will probably require a guiding hand from above to put together a new schedule on short notice, and I can’t see the exempt tournaments actually occurring (South Carolina was supposed to appear in the inaugural Women’s Battle 4 Atlantis, which I can’t envision happening). The conference schedule probably expands from 16 games to 20-some games. The SEC could even get to a full 30-game season by playing everyone twice. Or the conferences band together and match regional foes together in pods, possible at one location. Imagine South Carolina, Clemson, North Carolina, Duke, NC State, and Wake Forest all getting together in one place. Or South Carolina, Clemson, Georgia, Georgia Tech and Auburn in another.

The question would be, who gets to host? With attendance limited, if fans are allowed at all, South Carolina might lose the calling card it normally has in hosting events (crowd size). On the flip side, the resources and staff South Carolina has committed to women’s basketball might make it more capable of hosting other teams. Another factor: NC State and North Carolina, just for example, both have access to two arenas (Reynolds Coliseum and PNC Arena for NC State, Carmichael Arena and the Dean Dome for UNC). But, as I mentioned above, the marquee sites probably get gobbled up by men’s basketball. For example if you need multiple venues, Charlotte has the Spectrum Center, Bojangles Coliseum (they officially dropped the apostrophe), and Halton Arena. Men’s basketball will get first dibs on such a setup.

All this being said, the outlook for the season might be radically different by next week.