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    Beyond the Boxscore

    VCU coach Shaka Smart's rap & video games way: Forget Lombardi, young Final Fourcoaches embrace players

    Chris Baldwin
    Mar 29, 2011 | 11:04 pm
    • VCU coach Shaka Smart embraces his players. But it took a while for point guardJoey Rodrguez to believe and hug back.
    • Joey Rodriguez couldn't see how Smart could ever replace the imposing andcharismatic Anthony Grant.
    • Kentucky coach John Calipari is 52, but he still trends young with the recruitsthat matter.

    On the eve of the biggest game in the history of Virginia Commonwealth University, point guard Joey Rodriguez settled in for a video game against a familiar foe. His coach Shaka Smith.

    "We played 2K11," Rodriguez says of the NBA basketball game. "That's the game of choice on our team"

    Think UConn coach Jim Calhoun played Xbox with Kemba Walker the night before the Huskies faced off against Arizona for the right to go to Houston for the Final Four? The 68-year-old Calhoun doesn't even know what 2K11 is. Let alone possess the game controller (joystick) skills to challenge a college senior in the game.

    Say hello to the new face — or should we say, the new fast-twitch video game reflexes — of college basketball.

    "Shaka's just like one of us," Rodriguez says of his 33-year-old head coach. "You get in his car and he's got the rap music blaring, just like we do."

    There's no doubt that Smart and almost-as-young and even-more-established 34-year-old Butler coach Brad Stevens are changing the way athletic directors will look for college basketball coaches in the future. Half of the Final Four field is coached by guys who weren't even alive the last time Houston hosted college basketball's mega event. These are coaches who never saw iconic influencer John Wooden coach a game, who only know Bill Walton as a TV commentator.

    And they crashed the Final Four party with the two underdogs, the two non-power conferences teams, 11th-seed VCU from the Colonial Athletic Association and eighth-seed Butler from the Horizon League.

    But just because they're here, doesn't mean it's easy to be young and in command.

    Rodriguez thought so little of Smart when he first met him that he walked out on the coach and the entire VCU program. When Anthony Grant — the imposing coach who recruited Rodriguez to VCU — left to take the Alabama job and Smart was hired to replace him after Rodriguez's sophomore year, the point guard decided he would transfer.

    To a Division II school near his parents' Florida home. That's how unimpressed Rodriguez was with Shaka Smart at their first meeting. And it took Rodriguez almost two months to change his mind and pull back the transfer request.

    "He's this short guy with a big nose," Rodriguez says of Smart. "Then, you compare that to Coach Grant who was this big guy who had his own aura around him. I was so bent out of shape. I just couldn't see how Shaka could take us where I wanted to go."

    Rodriguez pauses. "Shows you what I know about basketball," he says.

    When asked what his coach would think of him saying he has a big nose, Rodriguez doesn't hesitate. "He'd probably laugh," he says.

    Freedom Squad

    Shaka Smart (whose father-figure grandfather died on Tuesday) tells reporters that his single-parent mother didn't set any rules for him as a kid. He never had a curfew. He didn't have to make his bed. His mother only demanded that he bring home good grades.

    How he managed his time to get them? Well, that was on him to figure out. He had to take ownership for his own actions.

    Smart seems to have taken a similar approach with his team. The Rams were granted by far the most freedom of any of the teams in San Antonio for the Southwest Regional. Smart let them walk around the city, visit the Alamo, employ a schedule that worked for them.

    "I haven't been getting much sleep at all this week to be honest," Rodriguez explained on the eve of VCU's shocking upset of No. 1 Kansas. How much sleep had he squeezed in? "I went to bed at 2:45 a.m. and got up around 11:45," Rodriguez said in the earnest way of a college kid who truly does believe that only nine hours of shuteye is an unfathomably tiny amount.

    But Smart let his team snooze. Sleep in till noon? Sure, just make sure you steal a Final Four berth from one of college basketball's storied superpowers the next day.

    Stevens comes across as a much more traditional coach than Smart in many ways. The Harry Potter look-alike will make a flying leap into his players in the locker room after a big win (which the CBS cameras love to show) sure, but at his heart, Stevens is a tactician, forever breaking down the game. This Indiana native who grew up idolizing Reggie Miller analyzes everything for an edge.

    Not that Stevens is necessarily focusing on the same things in that analysis as a Calhoun. What other coach in America can rattle off the number of hits his school's official website has received in an instant? Stevens — who gave up a career in marketing at Eli Lilly to take a wild shot at coaching — did just that in this week's Final Four coaches teleconference.

    "The two years prior to last year's Final Four run our website had 3.5 million hits a year, last year we had 111 million hits on our website," Stevens says. "Who knows what the impact will be? The positive attention it brings to your school and city is immeasurable."

    You really think you're going to out plot this guy? Forget about opposing coaches like Florida's two-time national champion Bill Donovan (who Stevens absolutely schooled in the regional final), you don't want to be an athletic director going against Brad Stevens in a contract negotiation. Or probably a car salesman either.

    The man will kill you with numbers.

    Knight & day

    It's easy to think that Smart and Stevens represent a new way of doing things. But in truth, college basketball's been shifting away from the draconian dictator for years and years. There's a reason that Bobby Knight went the last 13 years of his coaching career without winning a national championship and only got to one Final Four in that span, one less than Stevens has been to in the last two years.

    The very best players had no interest in being berated by Knight. These days, it's relate to your players or become a dinosaur. The Vince Lombardi stuff is best left for HBO documentaries.

    Kentucky coach John Calipari may be 52, technically closer in age to Calhoun than either Smart or Stevens, but he's long been a player's coach. Calipari took UMass to the Final Four at age 37 and he's never lost the attitude of letting players be (in fact, he's become the king of encouraging his college stars to jump to the NBA and chase their dream) or really much of his youthful demeanor (even if he did wear a grandpa's sweater to his Final-Four-clinching-win press conference).

    Cal is still thought of as cool by the McDonald's All-Americans of today. He tweets and just ask any sports writer who's ever written anything critical about him, how fast his grown daughters will attack on social media in defense of their dad.

    Not that any new-way coach — no matter how hot his rep — is immune from the barbs of youth.

    "Coach Smart is one of those guys who thinks he's hip, but isn't really hip," VCU senior guard Brandon Rozzell laughs. "He says things a certain way, where you can still tell he's old."

    Just a 33-year-old geezer in the Final Four, trying to keep up with those crazy kids.

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    Beyond the Boxscore

    Houston in line to get more Final Fours after 2016: NCAA officials expect it tobecome a regular

    Chris Baldwin
    Apr 5, 2011 | 7:07 pm
    • The success of Bracket Town meant almost as much to the NCAA as the success atReliant Stadium.
      Photo by Bruce Bennett
    • NCAA official Greg Shaheen praised Houston's Final Four efforts.
    • Kemba Walker wasn't the only one who flew high at this Final Four.
      Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

    When even NCAA officials are making jokes about the lowest-scoring NCAA Championship Game since 1949, you know they had a good time in Houston.

    That's what happens in the Final Four wrap-up press conference Tuesday. Greg Shaheen — the highest-ranking NCAA official in the room — opens his portion with a crack about the offensive woes Monday night.

    Shaheen notes that if more people had the motor shown by Houston Final Four Local Organizing Committee interim executive director Doug Hall then "we might have had a game last night where both teams scored 60 points."

    "You were on overdrive," Shaheen says to Hall.

    Yes, there is a whole lot of love in the room when the Houston LOC and the NCAA meet for the last time before this 2011 Final Four becomes part of the record books — and thoughts begin to slowly turn to the 2016 Final Four that will be held in Houston and the 2015 regional at Reliant Stadium before that.

    It does not figure to end in 2016 though. Shaheen — the NCAA's interim executive vice president of championships and alliances — tells CutureMap he expects there will be even more Final Fours in Houston in the future.

    "I don't see any reason why Houston wouldn't become a regular part of our rotation," Shaheen says.

    Shaheen would be the first to say that the NCAA's Basketball Committee will make the final call like usual on future sites, but he says the committee is thrilled with Houston's performance.

    "This is what a showcase event should look like," Shaheen says of a Houston event that set the Final Four record for total attendance (145,747 at the two nights of games) and also drew an estimated 140,000 to the Big Dance Concert Series (the concert figure is based on an "approximation" of the number of people who came through Discovery Green during all three concerts that lasted several hours each) and another 49,000 to Bracket Town at the George R. Brown Convention Center. "This is what a national championship should feel like.

    "It should be exhausting the next morning and be a seamless effort."

    Later Shaheen quips, "UConn is not the only winner here."

    Instead, Texas might be the biggest winner of all. For the Lone Star State has emerged as the NCAA's big event darling. Texas will host three Final Fours in a six-year stretch (Houston in 2011 and 2016, Dallas in 2014). And that type of dominance is not expected to end anytime soon either.

    "In the modern era, for both the men's and women's championships, I don't know that any state has emerged like Texas," Shaheen says. "And I think you have to include San Antonio (host of the 1998, 2004 and 2008 Final Fours) in that equation as well. There are a lot of things Texas offers the championships that are unique."

    Standing off to the side in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency — which served as the headquarters for the coaches convention during Final Four week, housing all the big names who weren't coaching in the games — Robert Dale Morgan is sure of what makes Houston such a lure.

    Morgan, the president and executive director of the 2011 Houston Final Four LOC, held a similar position for Houston's 2004 Super Bowl and many credit his vision with helping the city see its big sports event potential, with a Super Bowl, Major League Baseball All-Star Game, NBA All-Star Game, Major League Soccer All-Star Game and now a Final Four all having been held here since 2004. Not that Morgan wants that recognition.

    He chooses to sit in the crowd rather than on the stage at the wrap-up press conference. He probably could have blended in to, wearing a Houston Final Four hat with his suit, if so many people on the stage didn't point him out. Bob Beauchamp, chairman of the Houston Final Four LOC, calls Morgan, "the best in the business."

    "Having six million people who care," Morgan says in explaining how Houston's positioned itself as the host city with the most. "Having a dozen Fortune 500 companies. And oh by the way, we have really great weather 300 days out of the year."

    Trash Talk Between Friends

    Houston hands off the Final Four to New Orleans, next year's host. The transition is a bit of intentional symbolism by the NCAA which wants to recognize how closely the two cities are linked and the Bayou City's role in helping after Hurricane Katrina.

    This will be the fifth Final Four that New Orleans has hosted and the city's LOC executive director John Koerner can't help but point out to Houston, the new city in "the rotation," how great every one of the NCAA Championship Games held in the Big Easy has been.

    "New Orleans has hosted some of the most memorable finals ever," Koerner says. "We had Michael Jordan's shot, Keith Smart's shot, Chris Webber's infamous timeout and Hakim Warrick's block at the buzzer."

    And from its first Final Four, Houston has? Well, a whole lot of clangs — and Butler's record-low 18.8 percent shooting.

    Not that anyone in the NCAA is holding it against the Bayou City. The organization credentialed 1,387 media members for this Final Four, loved the visibility brought about by having it in one of the America's biggest cities. Even if you have to wonder how much everyone was into it locally. The TV rating in Houston for the unsightly Butler-UConn national championship game only ranked 30th out of the 56 major media markets.

    Shaheen's not dwelling on that. Instead, he's sticking around Houston to take in more of the city without the pressures of the mega event.

    "I don't have a flight home," Shaheen says, knowing that Southwest Airlines' grounded jets have made it much harder than usual to land one last minute. "So I'll be staying here two, three, four, five more days. I may be looking to get an apartment and just become a resident."

    Shaheen laughs. Who says NCAA suits don't have a sense of humor?

    When they are happily in Houston, they sure do.

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