INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis is showing off its moves for the Big Dance, ready to host all 67 games of the NCAA tournament at six venues in central Indiana.
"It is time to do our dance," said Katie Douglas, Indianapolis Organizing Committee co-chair, at a March Madness tip-off news conference Monday morning at Bankers Life Fieldhouse. "We need to dance for our city and our state. We need to dance for the student-athletes and the teams, and we need to dance for the people that are watching worldwide that are going to be taking part in this moment with us."
While a dance team performed at the news conference, Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett showed off a few dance moves of his own. Hogsett believes 25 percent fan capacity at Marion County March Madness venues is a good move too.
"I think that is a very safe and healthy balance between enjoying the games and keeping them safe at the same time, all leading to a national champion that we unfortunately had to miss all of last year,” Hogsett said.
All but one of the 68 teams are expected in town by the end of Monday. Purdue arrived late Monday morning at the Hyatt Regency. Teams are also staying at the JW Marriott, the Marriott Downtown and the Westin in a controlled environment, or COVID-free "bubble."
Each player and person traveling with the teams must have seven consecutive days of negative COVID tests before coming to Indianapolis. They are tested upon arrival and again 12 hours later and must have two negative tests in Indianapolis before they can begin practicing or participating in any other tournament activities.
Each team has its own floor at their hotel. Each player has his own room. There is a strict code of conduct to keep teams protected within the controlled environment and to ensure the games go on starting Thursday.
"No one is bigger than this tournament overall — no one person, no group of people, and no team," said NCAA Senior Vice President of Basketball Dan Gavitt. "The basketball committee is prepared, if necessary, to take discipline action should anyone violate that code of conduct in an egregious way."
Many teams with automatic bids to the tourney arrived over the weekend and made visits to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Some teams watched the selection show Sunday at the Speedway.
Virginia is the only team not arriving until later this week due to a positive COVID-19 test within the team that forced the Cavaliers to withdraw from their conference tourney last week. As of now, Virginia is still in the Big Dance.
The Cavaliers won the last tournament in 2019.
Any teams that drop out of the tourney must be replaced by 6 p.m. Tuesday. Four teams that just missed at-large bids are standing by.