This year’s NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament will undoubtedly be different than its half-century of predecessors.

Just what the outline of a postseason in a pandemic will look like remains uncertain a little more than two months before the postseason field is scheduled to be announced May 9 — not just for those outside the NCAA, but for those with a large part in pulling off the tournament as well.

Like so much in the world, it’s subject to change by the day. And for this year’s tournament, the things potentially in flux include the selection process, where tournament games will be played and even the number of teams involved thanks to the Ivy League bowing out of competition this spring.

“I think everything is flexible at this point,” said Towson athletic director Tim Leonard, the chair of the NCAA men’s lacrosse committee. “The one thing I’ve learned with this whole process just with our own plans here at Towson is whatever plans we made in June, to be honest with you, very few of them held up until even September. We changed directions so many different times and still do. It’s not as frequent as it was in the early part of the pandemic, but everything changes.”

While Leonard and his committee understandably haven’t evaluated teams during their weekly calls so early in the season, the dates and sites of the tournament have occupied plenty of time.

Since the field expanded to 16 teams in 2003, there have been eight first-round games hosted by higher-seeded teams the first weekend of the tournament, then two predetermined quarterfinal hosts the next weekend. The tournament has culminated with the semifinals and final on Memorial Day weekend since 1986.

Hofstra and Notre Dame are scheduled to play host to quarterfinal doubleheaders this season. East Hartford, Conn., is due to open a two-year run as the championship weekend host.

The biggest changes could be tied to the first round. Given the various pandemic restrictions, it would be difficult to assign a first-round game to a campus site on Sunday and expect to receive approval not just from schools but also local governments to play less than a week later.

“Are we going to be able to still do the first round like we normally do, or are we going to have to go to predetermined sites?” Leonard said. “I would say it’s probably leaning more toward that right now, having a predetermined site, simply because of all the logistics we have to have answers on.”

It creates an almost endless string of hypotheticals, but it’s worth remembering some other key components. One is cost containment, something the NCAA often applies to the tournament but has even more incentive to be concerned with given the current economic conditions. Tied to that is testing demands, which would be more cost-effective if done at fewer sites.

Especially in the latter stages of the tournament, the committee leans heavily on NCAA personnel to run the event. Yet with fall championships shifted to the spring, those people are especially spread thin.

These are exactly the variables and questions the committee is already pondering, even if there aren’t firm answers yet.

“If we’re going to have to go to predetermined first-round sites, how would we go about it? Are we looking at doing one, two, eight? Don’t know,” Leonard said. “Is there a combination of, ‘Hey, we just go to one market and we might have multiple sites that you would play [at], but just make it so it’s all in one general market so that we can have our testing personnel [in one place].”

There’s also the matter of the play-in game, which is usually contested the Wednesday after the field is announced. It exists because NCAA rules stipulate no more than 50 percent of the tournament field can be automatic qualifiers. In recent years, there have been nine conferences with automatic bids, and the play-in game whittles the total down to eight for a 16-team field.

Yet with the Ivy League’s decision to not compete in the spring, there will only be eight automatic bids awarded. That means the play-in game isn’t needed for its original purpose, though it is uncertain if it will be scrapped this spring.

“It’s been discussed,” Leonard said. “We haven’t formalized anything on that yet, and we know we’re going to have to move on that relatively quickly. If this were normal circumstances and an AQ can’t participate, we typically wouldn’t change the size of the field. You’d just open one more at-large spot. This isn’t a normal year. We’ve got some more discussion on that and some things we’re going to have to look before we make that decision.”

Leonard said he anticipates that decision being made by the end of March.

None of this has even covered the task the committee is most known for publicly: Selecting and seeding the tournament. And sure enough, the unusual season will provide one-time-only challenges on that front, too, when the time comes to evaluate teams.

Leonard said the committee’s weekly discussions with the 10-coach regional advisory committee “is going to play a bigger role than ever” as it attempts to make sense of a season with some leagues (such as the Big East) opting for more limited non-conference play, others (including the Big Ten) choosing for a league-only approach to its schedule and nearly everyone playing fewer games than normal.

In aggregate, the committee might have to modify how it assesses teams, at least in 2021.

“It’s going to be really hard to use the same tools that we always use because people aren’t going to be playing as many games,” Leonard said. “A lot of teams aren’t going to play the schedule they would normally play, so are we going to have good evaluative data at our fingertips? How much of the eye test is going to come into play? This year, I would say probably more than most. But we’ll see. We know those are going to be things that we’re really going to have to discuss.”