Column: What will fans talk about without sports?

Going a week without watching sports used to be a dare. It’s the new reality.

A quick glance at today’s TV sports listings provides all the confirmation you need. It looks like the departure screen at the airport during a blizzard:

Canceled.

Canceled.

Postponed.

Canceled.

Efforts by sports leagues to contain the spread of the virus have become one more way to track the impact of the outbreak around the globe. The closer the event was to a cluster of cases, the more likely it was to be played in front of empty seats, canceled or about to be. After several weeks watching from what seemed like a safe distance, sports fans in the United States are waking up to see those red pins scattered across their maps.

On Thursday, conference basketball tournaments stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific hung a “Sorry, We’re Closed” sign on the door. The NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS did the same. The last likely major college basketball game of any import to be played, a Big East tournament contest between St. John’s and Creighton at Madison Square Garden, was abandoned at halftime Thursday.

“Bizarre. We shouldn't have been here today," said St. John's TV analyst Brandon Tierney. “There's no other way to put it. We had enough information last night when we went to bed.”

Now picture the poor person who crawled off the couch just before intermission to make a quick lunch, then returned to find a blank screen. The rest of us will be wearing that same expression soon enough.

If the idea of self-quarantine held any allure for sports fans, it was the chance to binge-watch March Madness and Opening Day in baseball. Good luck with that. Televised games are about to become as scarce as toilet paper at Costco.

There were still three notable holdouts as of midday: pro golf,...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/college/article/Column-What-will-fans-talk-about-without-sports-15127455.php