I should also note that the NCAA makes as much money off of March Madness as the major sports leagues make from all of their revenue streams - and yet the NCAA was willing to cancel March Madness this year.
The fact that March Madness didn't happen this year is another reason why NBA and NHL should have canceled.
The NCAA's finances are misleading, though, because of the structure of college sports.
For the pro leagues, the league sells national TV/playoff rights, and merchandise; and divides that revenue evenly to the teams (after expenses). The NCAA is similar, except that it ONLY has the playoffs (and not the FBS football playoffs). And it has 356 Division I members, plus Division II and Division III. So while the March Madness TV contract is huge, it's also 96% of the total revenue, and it's 100% given away to all the members of DI, DII, DIII (after expenses). The conferences make more TV money combined per year than March Madness makes; however, there's no revenue sharing among conferences.
Delaying and rescheduling the NCAA Tournament would be straight up impossible due to all the moving pieces. The venues are booked YEARS in advance. I remember when the US was about to invade Afghanistan, the NCAA was considering postponing the tournament by 2 weeks. They lined up Dayton as a Plan B host site in case they couldn't get all sites to reschedule. Well, I don't know exactly how many couldn't reschedule, but they pretty much found it impossible to reschedule, bailed on that concept in a hurry, and called up Condoleeza Rice for "permission" to just go ahead as scheduled.
Given where we were March 10-17, it's not surprising at all they canceled the whole thing.
They also had the issue of automatic bids and the rules in place. Basically, once the Selection Committee convenes, conferences can not deviate from their plan to award the automatic bid. The SEC found this out when they had the tornado in Atlanta during their tournament in 2008. They were considering canceling the tournament and giving the autobid to the regular season champion. The NCAA said that if they don't complete the tournament, they don't get an autobid (And of course, Georgia was alive with no chance of an at-large, so they'd be screwed).
The Ivy League canceled their tournament and announced the regular season champ would get their auto-bid, but they did it BEFORE their tournament started/committee convened. Same in 1990 when the WCC canceled their tournament in the semis when Hank Gathers died. The WCC Tourney is a week before the committee convenes.
So you had half of the NCAA with no auto bids because tournaments were canceled. The NCAA flatly rejected even announcing the field of "who WOULD HAVE" made the NCAA Tournament.