Jay Bilas Interview

Now being joined by ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Billis, there are a lot of things to get to regarding the NCAA, the ACC, college hoops, college sports and otherwise. But the first thing I'm interested in, how have you been filling this extra unexpected time, Jay Billis? Well, a lot of this, a lot of talking about the events of the last week, primarily, and continuing to do my job.

But, you know, moving on in different ways and trying to make sure that my family is taken care of and we're doing the best we can to be prepared. Your son, of course, played for Danny Manning at Wake Forest. And I think it's only right that we start local. You were in our backyard last week at the ACC tournament in Greensboro. And at this time last week, we were talking about the ACC tournament being a test of sorts where it was the first tournament held here, the ACC, since 2015, first one in five years since the nine ACC ADs have been hired who have no connection to Greensboro whatsoever.

So when you see this tournament getting canceled, understanding how much the tournament means to that place, being someone who played there and covered many tournaments there, what do you think the right thing for the ACC to do is in terms of the next time they come back to Greensboro? Because D.C. and Barclays Center is next up. Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know the answer to that. I don't know sort of the relevance of it. I know it's relevant to Greensboro, but I think right now, you know, we're looking at very serious issues facing all of college sports, all of sports in general, and basically our global economy. So things are going to change and they're going to change awfully quickly as we've seen. I mean, where we are now, where we're basically, you know, restaurants and bars and gyms and all this are shut down. Who could have fathomed this 10 days ago that every sports entity across our country would shut down operations completely? That would be unfathomable.

And there's no short-term cessation for this. So we've got a lot of things to deal with coming up. And I don't think anybody knows the answer to where does the ACC tournament go five years from now or four years from now, whatever it is. The NCAA, they acted swiftly in canceling the tournament.

They acted swiftly in dealing with the scholarships and eligibility for the spring sports. Now, I think it's the deeper issues of what you do with the athletes who were seniors unable to compete in March Madness this year or even finish out their conference tournaments. What's the biggest issue you think the NCAA is debating back and forth in this discussion of eligibility for seniors who weren't able to finish their careers the right way? Well, first of all, the way I understand it, they haven't decided anything even with regard to spring sports.

A single committee made a recommendation that it would be appropriate for that. Right. That's not that's not a decision or an action. I frankly don't think that this is not not that's not the time for us to discuss it, but it's not the time for the NCAA to take this up. They've got bigger issues facing not only association, but the member institutions. I mean, right now, all these campuses are completely shut down and there's no prospect of them opening back up for the school year or for the summer, for that matter. So the idea that we're concerned about whether whether seniors play next year seems seems a bit a bit tone deaf, you know, that how are we going to how are we going to make those decisions when there are gigantic issues facing all these campuses that have to do, you know, first and foremost with when they can open up again, you know, whether their students are going to graduate, you know, all those kind of issues and how they conduct their business and finish out this current school year.

They do it online. If they don't do it, who knows? I don't even know all the issues. They're going to be significant financial issues that all these institutions are facing, not just from the revenue loss, from the cancellation of conference tournaments and the cancellation of the NCAA tournament. But endowments are taking a hit. They're not bringing in revenue right now from just even their food service and their, you know, like these schools, I mean, they're gonna have a hard time charging for dormitories and on campus housing when they're not letting anybody on campus, that's going to be a tough one. So there are a lot of issues facing these universities. And I think it may not be the last thing they need to worry about, but way down the list is, you know, restoring eligibility. I like how comprehensive you are and recognizing a lot of things that people might not be thinking about. But as you're outlining every specific thing, I think about what Mike Krzyzewski said in the wake of the national or the NIL conversation a couple of months ago, talking once again about college basketball's need for a commissioner of sorts, not just having Mark Emmert have to be the one address every single issue and having someone who's specifically designated dealing with the issues of college basketball.

David Thiel wrote about it last week and he was asking John Swafford about it. He didn't think that was the time to address it. But in times like this, do you think this kind of stresses the need of having something central, somebody central that specifically has the interest of college basketball in mind? Well, hopefully not times like this.

Hopefully we won't have another time like this. But just for any time, having proper coordination is vital in any leadership capacity. So you could see even on Wednesday when the decision was made and it was the right intermediate step, but it was just an intermediate step when the NCAA decided that the tournament, the NCAA tournament would proceed with no fans. That announcement was made and it was made without notifying the conferences. So there was very little coordination or communication while that was going on. The NCAA had information from its assembled panel of experts in the healthcare field, but that wasn't made available or coordinated very well with the conferences. So it was certainly a bad look for the conferences to be playing games on Wednesday night with full crowds when the NCAA said at 4.30 that we're not going to play with fans.

So there's a disconnect there. The NCAA got all the broad strokes right. They made all the right big decisions. But it did point up some sort of structural leadership failures or leadership problems that the current system has. And those could be fixed going forward, but it's going to take some recognition that there needs to be change and even needs to be changes in leadership going forward.

This seems to me that when we're through this particular catastrophe that would be a very good time to assess those things and make some changes. When you're trying to pinpoint how surreal last week was, you being in Greensboro as we all were, where's the first thing you go to as somebody who was on the court with Dan Shulman as Florida State was being yanked off the floor and then we learned that there was going to be no tournament and no tournaments across college basketball? Probably 9 o'clock that morning when I was on the set of Packer and Durham for the ACC Network and was asked what should happen and my response was emphatically that you can't play. The tournament needs to be cancelled and there's no way to hold a tournament. And John Swafford got up right after that and said, well, the ACC is going to play the games. And I thought, there's no way that people should walk into this building.

It's irresponsible. And that became clearer and clearer and you figured that something has to change. There's no way we're going to play. And it wasn't until just right around noon, I would say, when we got word that the Big Ten cancelled. It wasn't the Big East, it was the American Athletic Conference, the Southeastern Conference, they'd all cancelled.

Now the Big East tipped off at noon. And you're like, what is going on? That's bizarre.

And there's no way. When Florida State ran out on the floor, and I think I was on the SportsCenter at the time, and the Florida State band started playing, I think I even said to the SportsCenter anchor that this is tone deaf. This feels wrong. And I don't know what the timing was. 15, 20 minutes later, John Swafford pulled the plug on the whole thing. And I didn't think after what happened on Wednesday, I didn't think there was any way that anyone would bring people into a building. It just seemed like it was socially irresponsible.

And it turns out, several days later, what are we, five days removed from all that? And bars and restaurants are closed. And you can't go sit down most places. I live in Charlotte, and it's already hit here.

And in the tri-state area up in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, you know, they've closed all restaurants except for takeout and all that. So I mean, things have changed. And it's going to be this way for a while. But it took people, including people in leadership positions, quite a while to wrap their heads around it. And I don't blame them.

It's a difficult thing. If Rudy Gobert doesn't contract the virus and the game doesn't get canceled when it was last Wednesday, are you convinced games get played the next couple of days? Maybe a few. Maybe a few games get played.

But I think ultimately we would have wound up in the same place. You know, remember, before that happened, the NCAA came out with this decision that we're going to play with no fans. And so it's not like that all these actions that are taken were, you know, totally foreign to, you know, leaders in the infectious disease area in the health care field. I mean, I was told two weeks ago by one of my really good friends who's a happens to be a doctor. He reached out to me and gave me a bunch of literature to read on the impending pandemic and global pandemic. And he advised me, said, I don't want to alarm you, but he said, I don't think you should fly anymore. That if you've got the opportunity to drive, you should drive. And because he knew there were going to continue to be games over that period.

And I did the best I could to drive during that period based on his advice. And it turns out he was right. Turns out the Ivy League was right.

The Ivy League canceled their tournament, I think, on Monday morning. And people thought they were crazy. And so clearly things have changed and minds have changed. But I thought it was when I thought the biggest moment was not Rudy Gobert.

It just in my mind, I thought the biggest moment was when the World Health Organization on Wednesday morning declared it a global pandemic. That's that's big stuff. And and that shook me. And I can't imagine I was alone there.

And John Swafford, he's a very smart guy. But the day after the Rudy Gobert stuff happens, the moment I knew that it just isn't a sound argument to play is when somebody asked him at the press conference, hey, if somebody gets the coronavirus, if somebody has contracted it in college basketball, isn't it too late at that point? And his response was, that's a fair question. I don't have the answer.

If I guess if nobody gets it, it would have been the right answer. And if and if you're getting to that point, you know, it's not a sound argument to play. And two hours later, players aren't playing on the floor anymore. So well, and that points up, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that points up sort of the lack of coordination on the part of the NCAA office and and the commissioners and the member institutions like the commissioners represent the member institutions. And they were and by the time we had gotten to Wednesday, we're only talking about the biggest conferences in the country that were were having their tournaments. And the fact that they didn't have the same access to the information that was being provided by the advisory panel to the leadership team for the NCAA, I think is a is a failure in leadership. Now, everybody made the right decision and they made it within a day of one another.

But it wasn't done in a coordinated fashion and it should have been. Last thing for you, Jay, before we let you go. Jay Bill is with us at the ESPN. What where is the next place the NCAA and Mark Immerts input needed? What's the next thing you would like to see from them, their next role in this?

Well, it's all part and parcel of the same same role. Look, I felt that that the NCAA shouldn't be just putting out written statements behind a blue background on social media. I felt that given and this is, I think, a tremendous leadership failure on the part of the NCAA. The NCAA is always talking about education, education, education. That's great.

I don't have any problem with it. But I mean, given that's been the stance and the mantra on NCAA member institutions on those campuses are some of the world's leaders in not only infectious diseases, but in the health care field. And whether it be research, you name it, medical professionals, and why the NCAA didn't have an oppressive act. And to be able to say, here's, here's what we are doing. Here's why we are doing it. Here's the advice we've been given. And here are the medical professionals that gave that advice, ask them whatever questions you want. And they can and then after that, there should be coordinated by the NCAA daily, you know, if not more often, whatever, whatever vehicle you want, whether it's webinars or the same, where they can get all of the, you know, some of these experts they have on their member campuses, to be educating the public on what is going on and what should happen.

In other words, how you can take care of yourself, how you should social distance, why, how to, you know, how to best go about this. We are all in a way stumbling around in the dark on this. And, and through social media, you have people I would consider to be uninformed saying, more people die with the flu. This is just like the No, it's not.

It's not like the flu. And this is not being made up. So in the absence of a voice, a reassuring voice from the NCAA, we've got a bunch of voices taking over in other areas that are not as informed, they do not have access to informed voices. And I think that's a problem. So rather than sit here and talk about fake brackets, and should we put out a bracket? What about the eligibility of people, Nicky, like, we're really worried about eligibility for people next year.

Now, I don't, I don't get that. And I don't get why we're not keeping you know, why maybe they're keeping their eye on the ball behind the scenes. But, but I'd like them to step forward and help educate the public with the, you know, marshaling the resources of the member institutions and, and starting to act like education is a primary focus. The NCAA is a public trust.

And I think they have a public responsibility in this. Jay Billis for college basketball commissioner. I think I think a lot of people would nominate you in that regard. Would that be something you're interested in?

Depends how much it pays. You're the absolute best. Good luck figuring out the rest of your march. It's appreciated for you to spend time in the Triad today. Thank you guys.

Good luck with everything and then stay safe. You got it. That's Jay Billis of ESPN. That is something we've actually discussed in private circles of the media. Okay, Jay Billis, he's the guy that you want to be the commissioner of college basketball. Is that going to be an upgrade in pay what he's making at ESPN? No, that's my guess.

I could be wrong, but that's my guess. And in terms of good information being put out there, Robert, I mean, it's true. The NCAA doesn't have anybody forward out saying, this is what you need to do.

Wash your hands, do all these things. Instead, we got Wu-Tang Clan out there giving you an acronym, much like the Dennis system. And it's always sunny in Philadelphia.

They spell out Wu-Tang. Also, we got Ed Orgeron. He has his PSA.

Like, if you need a forward voice to tell you what to happen in the wake of this crisis, what needs to happen, what better than this voice here? For every winning team, a key to success is learning the playbook. That's true in football. It's also true as we take on the coronavirus. The spread of coronavirus is a serious matter, but there's a game plan for keeping residents as safe as possible.

Everyone has a role to play as we face these channels together. Cover your cough with your elbow like this. Wash your hands thoroughly, a full 20 seconds. If you're sick, stay home.

If you think you should be tested, phone your health provider first. Avoid close contact with anyone who's sick. Protect your at-risk family members, including the elderly. If you're not at risk, take care as you go about your daily business.

Get the facts now from coronavirus.gov and your state health department. We're all in this together. Let's team up to protect our health. I feel like there's something missing at the end there. Maybe we can fill that void with something?

Possibly? Go Tigers. Yeah, that sounds a lot better. Appreciate J. Billis and his time. All right, we got the final four. Like, the NCAA shouldn't be worried about fake brackets. As J. Billis said, we, on the other hand, definitely should. This week, we don't have a real bracket to fill out, but we have a 2000s pop music bracket. We have the final four. Find out who the winner is going to be next on The Drive.