Villanova

Big East Basketball: Conference Will Let Schools Decide Fan Attendance (Update)

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Oct 28th, 2020 · 9:54 AM EDT

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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:

As for fans in the stands, Val Ackerman says Big East will go school-by-school, based on rules of local jurisdictions. #BIGEASThoops

— Howard Megdal (@howardmegdal) October 28, 2020

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:

We are fired up to get back to competing together – a challenging non-conference and @BIGEASTMBB journey ahead ! https://t.co/Gi5ykDP4kh pic.twitter.com/jhkx9cYtkr

— Jay Wright (@CoachJayWright) October 28, 2020

Update 2:

Villanova also announces that home games will be played with no more than 15% capacity as per state COVID-19 guidelines for indoor venues. Student-athlete families, students, faculty, and staff will be the ones allowed to attend.@NovaMBB #Villanova

— Ed Benkin (@EdBenkin) October 28, 2020