A Plagued landscape

Look, maybe Kansas wins anyway. It's possible.

Every changed reality is still a reality, so maybe No. 2 Baylor still shoots like it forgot how, still looks half-a-bubble off plumb, still loses for the first time in this Bastard Plague college basketball season. It's not like the Bears were playing Directional Hyphen State Tech, after all. No, Kansas was itself ranked (No. 17), and had won 17 of its 25 games coming in, and had won five of its last six games. So maybe the Jayhawks still win in a season not warped all out of round by the Big Sick.

Doesn't mean Baylor coach Scott Drew didn't have a point, postgame.

His point was the Bears were the best shooting in the nation, and so there could be only one reason why they missed 20 of 26 3-point attempts. four days after missing 17 of 25 against Iowa State. And that reason was rust. That reason was the Bastard Plague.

See, until that game against Iowa State on Tuesday, COVID-19 issues had postponed Baylor's last six games. The Bears hadn't played in three weeks. They hadn't even practiced for almost that long. So, yeah, it didn't sound like plain old excuse-making when Drew called COVID-19 protocols Baylor's "kryptonite."

Without the Dali-esque topography of this Plague year, after all, the Bears wouldn't have had a three-week black hole in the middle of their season. They likely wouldn't have needed overtime to crawl past 2-18 Iowa State, the worst team in the Big 12 and one of the worst in the nation. And if they might have still lost at Kansas yesterday, it's doubtful they would have gone down by 13.

Which they did, 71-58.

So now the Bears have a scuff mark in the loss column, and we're once again left to wonder if this entire season should come with a giant easy-to-apply asterisk. Because the way it's played out almost certainly is not the way it would have played out without the hillocks and switchbacks created by playing a college basketball season in the middle of a pandemic. 

In big ways and small, it's altered everything. Without the Plague, to begin with, there would still be traditional home-court advantages. Now there are none. How many road teams have benefited from that, and how many home teams have been unable to use it for fuel the way they usually do?

Maybe, as with Baylor-Kansas, the outcomes would have been the same anyway. But if not -- if all the postponements and all the games in sterile all-but-empty snakepits did in fact have an effect -- how much different would the coming NCAA Tournament look? How many teams that slide off the bubble in a couple of weeks would not have done so?

We'll never know. Just as we'll never know if Baylor would have run the table -- or if, for that matter, they might have already lost to someone whose own season has been disrupted by this alien landscape.

Yessir. Go find that asterisk.