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Report: Ivy League basketball tournament to be cancelled due to Coronavirus

Taking a look at who, where and when for the Ivy conference championship, which will be hosted on the campus of Harvard

North Carolina Tar Heels guard Brandon Robinson against Yale Bulldogs guard Eric Monroe in the second half at Dean E. Smith Center. Nell Redmond-USA TODAY Sports

UPDATE, March 10, 11:21 a.m.: The Ivy League announced the cancellation.

UPDATE, March 10, 11:19 a.m.: The Ivy League is reportedly going to cancel its conference tournament due to COVID-19. If that happens, the regular season champion Yale Bulldogs will be declared the champion and will secure the league’s automatic bid for the 2020 NCAA Tournament.

The Ivy League Men’s Basketball Tournament will take place March 14th and 15th at Lavietes Pavilion on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Ivy unsurprisingly does things differently when it comes to postseason. After decades of resisting postseason play at all, the compromise was reached for a four-team, two-day tournament to select the leagues automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. That means half the teams in the Ancient Eight will not participate in postseason

Here is the bracket:

March 14

Game 1: No. 4 Penn vs. No. 1 Yale 11:00 a.m. ET
Game 2: No. 3 Princeton vs. No. 2 Harvard 2:00 p.m. ET
* Live on ESPNU

March 15

Championship: Game 1 winner vs. Game 2 winner 12:00 p.m. ET
* ESPN2

Yup, that’s the whole bracket.

There is a slim chance that Yale could slide into the NCAA Tournament as an at-large bid, but otherwise whomever wins two games in Boston will be the league’s lone representative. Yale’s loss at Penn State by two points, one of the rare opportunities for an Ivy to pick up a Q1 win, fell just short. The Bulldogs are 57 in the NET, but it will be tough to improve on that number with a schedule that only has fellow Ivies remaining.