College Sports Fan's Viewing Guide for Wednesday Amid Coronavirus Shutdown

In an ideal world, fans of men's college basketball would spend Wednesday finalizing their brackets and watching the last two games of the NCAA tournament's First Four in Dayton, while college football fans would have done some of the same while reading up on news of recruiting visits and spring practices.

In reality, Wednesday marks one week since Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19, which shortly thereafter resulted in the postponement of basically all sports until further notice.

On Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended that all gatherings of 50 or more people scheduled for the next eight weeks either be postponed or canceled, so this whole "no sports" thing may be our new normal until May, if not longer.

But before you resign yourself to a 17th cycle of watching The Office from start to finish on Netflix, we've got some options to help fill that college-sports-sized hole in your life. Initially, we'll be more focused on basketball than football. It is March, after all.

Cable Options (all times ET)

If you're mourning the lack of March Madness and need to fulfill an urge to flip back and forth between multiple channels of college hoops, CBS Sports and ESPNU are your best friends Wednesday. Both channels have games on from 12:01 a.m. Wednesday "morning" until 6 p.m. that evening. In fact, ESPNU is showing (at least) 24 consecutive hours of college basketball.

CBS Sports is only airing games from the most recent season, and you can go ahead and disregard Villanova's 76-61 win over Butler that is inexplicably airing at midnight, 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. However, Butler at Georgetown (2 a.m. and 8 a.m.), Wichita State at Connecticut (10 a.m. and 4 p.m.) and especially Dayton vs. Colorado (noon and midnight) are pretty good games. There's also Dayton at VCU at 2 p.m., but that was Obi Toppin's worst game of the season by far.

On ESPNU, the highlights are Duke vs. North Carolina (9 a.m.), Oregon vs. Gonzaga in the Battle 4 Atlantis (1 p.m.), Dayton vs. Kansas in the Maui Invitational (5:30 p.m.) and then six straight hours of Kevin Durant's lone season at Texas. We're talking great games, too. The 2007 Big 12 championship versus Kansas (one overtime) is at 7 p.m., followed immediately by the double-overtime game against Acie Law IV and Texas A&M.

Not much to recommend here on the football front, but if you get the SEC Network and feel like watching a bunch of Auburn games, you're in luck. There's Mississippi State vs. Auburn at 1 a.m., Ole Miss vs. Auburn at noon and Alabama vs. Auburn at 9 p.m.

YouTube Options

Patrick Semansky/Associated Press

Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of Jimmer Fredette scoring 37 points in a first-round, double-overtime game against Florida. One year after that, VCU's run to the Final Four began in earnest with a round-of-64 beatdown of Georgetown.

It is also the four-year anniversary of one of the most chaotic days in NCAA tournament history: No. 13 seed Hawaii upset California, No. 14 seed Stephen F. Austin toppled West Virginia and No. 15 seed Middle Tennessee knocked off Michigan State. I can still vividly remember ripping my bracket to a million tiny pieces that day.

And two years ago was Nevada's unfathomable comeback from a 22-point deficit against Cincinnati.

If you're looking for a football fix, in honor of it being 3/18 on our calendars, here's a classic between No. 3 Miami vs. No. 18 Florida in 2003. (Fun fact: Florida was No. 21 in the AP poll and No. 18 in the coaches poll, but ESPN used the latter back in the day.)

Streaming Options

It won't be long before we're digging deep into the archives of the various streaming services and getting creative with suggestions here, but let's keep it simple for our first viewing guide:

The Waterboy is on Netflix.

Are the South Central Louisiana State University Mud Dogs a real college football team? Of course not. But Mr. Coach Klein says what mama don't know won't hurt her.

Even if you're like me and you've watched this Adam Sandler comedy a few dozen times over the years, chances are you could use a 90-minute Bobby Boucher-fueled hiatus from checking Twitter and/or the local news for coronavirus updates. Unless something's wrong with your medulla oblongata, that is.

If nothing else, we can use this down time to work on our collective Farmer Fran/Coach Orgeron impersonations.

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball and college football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @kerrancejames.