SAN ANTONIO — Jamie Skeen wants to know when the Final Four starts. He might have dragged a team to Houston, but that doesn't mean he's ever paid attention to the schedule for college basketball's defining event.

Why would he? After all, Skeen's a discard. A VCU Ram, a washed-up former North Carolina Mr. Basketball who went from the big time to about as small as one can get.

"When are we playing Butler?" Skeen asks, standing in the hallway outside the VCU locker room, grabbing some semblance of a quiet moment amid the Madness. "When does the Final Four start? Friday night?"

Told that it's Saturday — that the Final Four semifinals have been played on Saturday night for as long as anyone can remember, longer than he's been alive — Skeen shrugs.

"No one's ever invited me to the games," he says.

No one invited Jamie Skeen and VCU to this Final Four either. Instead, the Rams stormed the showcase, refused to be pushed off the stage, became champions of the Southwest Regional by knocking out Kansas, the biggest, baddest bully left in the NCAA Tournament, 71-61. It gives Houston one of the greatest basketball stories of all time and one of the worst commerce ones.

Truth is, if you are a business owner in the Bayou City, you were rooting for Kansas, Florida and any other traditional big conference power that could get there.

"Some of the economic impact is going to be determined by what teams get here, by how many upsets there are along the way," Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau CEO Greg Ortale told me right before the 68-team tournament began. "Some teams traditionally travel better than others. They bring more fans who end up spending more money, even if they don't get into the games. If Texas or Texas A&M were to make it here for example, it'd push things into the stratosphere."

Upsets are great for basketball, bad for business. Kansas fans outnumbered VCU ones by at least 10-1 at the Alamodome Sunday and about that many more Jayhawk fans probably would have descended on Houston too.

As Skeen himself says, "We're still accepting passengers. Our bandwagon is still pretty light. We'll always be accepting passengers. Look at how many more fans they had here tonight."

For a basketball story though, it's hard to match the Final Four that Houston gets. It's the underdogs and the powers with VCU and Butler, an 11th seed and an eighth seed, meeting in the first Saturday night semifinal and Kentucky and UConn, two of most successful programs of all time (even if UConn's time only really begins with coach Jim Calhoun), playing in the other.

You've got the most controversial coach in college basketball, with the joke going around that Kentucky's John Calipari is making his first Final Four appearance for the third time (Calipari's had Final Four runs with both UMass and Memphis later vacated from the record books because of off-court rules violations, not that sports fans really pay attention to that). You have a UConn team that's won nine straight tournament games dating back to start of the Big East Tournament and a VCU team that's won more games to get to the Final Four (five) than any program in college basketball history.

And of course, the Butler is back to try and do it.

No matter what happens on Saturday night at Reliant Stadium, the Monday night national championship game is guaranteed to be a David vs. Goliath showdown, mid-major versus traditional power, in many ways fighting for college basketball's soul.

No player personifies that battle quite like Skeen. He's a North Carolina kid who went to Wake Forest on a wave of hype, started as a freshman, lost his starting job as a sophomore and decided to transfer to VCU, an unknown university in an unremarkable city (Richmond, Va.) in the minor Colonial Athletic Association (CAA). To most basketball rankers, Skeen didn't just go from the big time to the small time.

He fell right off the map.

"Everybody thought I was washed up," says Skeen, a senior going on age 23. "They thought I was done. Nobody thought it was a good idea for me to transfer to VCU. Nobody.

"Not the Wake Forest coaches. Nobody in my family. None of my friends. None of my associates. They all told me I was making a big mistake."

Instead, Skeen ends up making the biggest shots in one of the biggest upsets in NCAA Tournament history. He drops 26 points and 10 rebounds on Kansas, gives Jayhawk fans another March nightmare that will likely never go way.

Guy Inspiration

How could Skeen not play the game of his life?

His guys, his teammates, the ones who give him grief for being so damn laid back ("Skeen is definitely not one of our vocal leaders," senior guard Ed Nixon laughs) came to him on the eve of the regional final with an urgent request. No, really, more of a plea — the type Charlie Sheen's gotten from CBS producers.

"We all went to Skeen and told him that we needed him to be the old Skeen," guard Bradford Burgess, the usual VCU lifeline, says. "That to beat Kansas, we needed him at his best."

Skeen knew he'd be going against Kansas' Morris twins, "two future NBA lottery picks" as he put it. Skeen knows he's not going to be a lottery pick. He's the type of guy who needs to get lucky to scrape and crawl his way into the league.

But he's a big man (6-foot-9) who can shoot. The Morris boys don't want to be chasing anyone outside. So that's where Skeen went — and kept shooting, and shooting, and shooting. He'd hoist up 17 shots in all, making only six of them. But four of those were 3-pointers, where he hit more than half his attempts. He'd get fouled on another three, hit 10-of-12 shots from the charity stripe overall, only five less free throw makes than the entire Jayhawks team managed.

"They just kept hitting big shots," Kansas guard Tyshawn Taylor says in Alamodome Locker Room A, the No. 1 seed's locker room, the now deathly quiet locker room. "We felt like, 'They're not going to keep hitting shots.' They're not going to keep hitting shots.

"But they kept hitting them ... It sucks, man. It sucks."

Skeen kept shooting even after he fired up a few air balls — the kind of shots that would have sucked the will out of a less well-traveled player.

"I air balled one so bad," Skeen says. "It wasn't even an air ball. It was more like a football pass. That's how bad it was. And the crowd's screaming, 'Air ball, air ball!'

"But I felt like the team needed me to keep shooting. Winning is possible."

A Day For The Discarded

VCU coach Shaka Smart kept driving that message anyway and every way. He set up a projector in the middle of the Rams' cramped locker room that replayed spliced together clips of all the prominent voices that picked the Jayhawks to roll right to Houston in an endless loop. President Obama and his Kansas champion bracket had a starring role. So did ESPN's Jay Bilas — who given another chance to give the team he said never should have even made the tournament a little respect — picked Kansas in a romp in this regional final too.

The projector is still running when reporters are first let into VCU's locker room. "Kansas, Kansas, Kansas, Kansas," is all you hear as the spliced together clips almost merge into a mantra.

"I must have heard Kansas 35 times in about two minutes," Burgess laughs.

Smart sent a different message in the huddle after he got called for a technical foul (his first technical in 39 games this season) with 15:43 left, with the No. 1 seed on a run, with the Jayhawk crowd going wild and the dream seemingly falling apart all around the Rams, like it has for so many underdogs past.

"Fuck the refs! Fuck Kansas!" Smart screamed. "This is about us. We've got to do what we've got to do."

From the First Four to the Final Four. On to Houston. With one of the best basketball stories of all time. Maybe, it's time to forget the business concerns and all the economic impact studies. For at least a moment.

There are reports that VCU spent $50,000 just to get another 100 students to the Alamodome in time for Sunday's game once it beat Florida State in a frantic overtime finish Friday night, just to give the Rams a few more people pulling for them amid all that Kansas blue. Maybe, the former commuter school will surprise again.

Either way, basketball's future will be decided on that Reliant Stadium Final Four floor: Mid majors vs. the power conferences, discards vs. the All-Americans. It's all barreling together on a collision course.

"There are a lot of players like me around college basketball," says Skeen, the Southwest Regional MVP. "Players who people forget about. Only now, some of us are getting to play in the Final Four."

As long as someone reminds them when the games are.

"I hope Houston's ready for us," VCU point guard Joey Rodriguez says, a piece of the Alamodome net tucked in his pocket. "We're going to Houston. How freaking crazy is that?"

Houston's Final Four is here. Do you really want to be one of the favorites?