Big East commissioner Val Ackerman spoke on Wednesday morning as the league revealed the early portion of it’s 2020-2021 men’s basketball schedule.

Villanova will open on Friday, December 11th, at Georgetown, followed by home games against Butler and DePaul before traveling to Marquette.

Will fans be in the Pavilion this season? That’s up to each school to decide individually:

Going by the recent guidelines established by Governor Wolf, Villanova would be allowed to have 15% capacity at the Pavilion, if they get local clearance. The arena holds about 6,500 people, so the number would be 975 for players, coaches, staff, media, and fans. If Philadelphia does provide clearance to use the Wells Fargo Center, it would be 10% of 19,500, so 1,950 coaches/staff/media/fans. That doesn’t seem likely though, that Philly would sign off. We’re not even sure if we’ll have the Flyers, Sixers, and Wings games in front of fans this season.

For some context, Delco gave the Union clearance to have fans at Subaru Park before Philadelphia allowed the Eagles to have fans at the Linc, so that’s one thing that might benefit Villanova here, the fact that they are not within the city limits. Temple, St. Joe’s, Penn, La Salle, and Drexel are all in Philly proper and would probably have a harder time getting clearance for fans in their arenas.

We’ll see. We’re approaching winter as COVID cases begin to rise, so predicting anything now seems… premature.

Edit –

Some more games from Jay Wright:

Update 2: