UPDATE: The NCAA Cancels All Winter and Spring Championships. The Season Is Over.

UPDATE: The NCAA has decided to cancel the Men’s and Women’s basketball tournaments as well as all further winter and spring sports championships this year. The season is over.

The cascade of sports cancellations and suspensions has continued this morning. Shortly after announcing that the remainder of the SEC Basketball tournament would not be played, the SEC, as well as many other D1 conferences announced that all athletic events would be suspended until the end of the month. The SEC appears to be the only conference giving a hopeful resume date of March 30th, while the other leagues are only saying “until further notice.”

Along with that, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey announced in a TV interview that the SEC Gymnastics championship, scheduled for March 21st in Duluth GA, is outright canceled. The NCAA is still re-evaluating everything at the moment as far as the national championships are concerned.

The problem for baseball (and any spring sport like softball or lacrosse) is that multiple D1 conferences have already announced that they are outright canceling the remainder of their seasons now. At the moment it’s only smaller conferences like the Ivy League and Patriot League, but I would expect that to snowball further in the coming hours and days. If enough leagues do decide to close shop for the spring, the NCAA may have no choice but to end the seasons.

And for the smaller leagues, it’s not even that hard of a decision to make. We take for granted sometimes the popularity of spring sports in the SEC, but for the vast majority of D1, it’s just not something that has any monetary value or is worth risking safety over. There’s an off chance the SEC might resume without them, but that’s just my own speculation at this point.

LSU baseball was actually in the middle of loading the bus for Oxford when the news broke. Coach Mainieri says that the team will continue to practice for now while awaiting further instruction from the SEC.