St. John’s vs Butler is cancelled, COVID reasons

Tonight’s St. John’s game against the Butler Bulldogs is cancelled because of “COVID-19 health and safety protocols within the Red Storm men’s basketball program” — in other words, positive cases.

Just today, the Big East announced that the previous rule on COVID cancellations would be revised. The rule was that a team that lacks enough healthy, non-COVID-positive bodies to field a team would be assessed a forfeit. That rule made more sense before the current surge of COVID-19 cases, featuring a new variant that regularly infects vaccinated individuals.

(By all accounts, vaccination helps keep the infection mild, if you are wondering — but this site will not become a place for the current fights in the wider culture. Thank you for listening.)

The league will work to reschedule games that are missed because of forfeits, which means St. John’s will indeed need to play Seton Hall twice.

With multiple players announced out for Butler since a couple of days ago, and an unrevised 10-day quarantine period, St. John’s would seem to have at least four players out until December 31st — after the game against Marquette.

The Rumble will keep you posted, and here’s hoping for basketball next week.

Will you ne watching any other teams tonight? BYU/ Vanderbilt is on at 10 PM... Liberty is playing Stanford... um... George Mason is playing Wisconsin... slim pickings this close to Christmas.