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    Beyond the Boxscore

    Why losing Ashley Judd could kill Houston's Final Four: Pitiful UConn fanscreate title game worry

    Chris Baldwin
    Apr 3, 2011 | 1:57 am
    • Reliant Stadium was filled with more 75,000 fans for the Final Four semifinals.
      Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images
    • But some fans felt like the free Big Dance concert was even more hopping.
      Photo by © Michelle Watson/CatchlightGroup.com
    • Kemba Walker's March may not be fully appreciated by his fans, but Houston'sshould buy in.
      Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

    With Houston's Final Four at its absolute loudest — with a crowd of 75,421 finally flexing its full power, with the scene playing out like the H-Town power brokers who fought for this event always envisioned — a 19-year-old turns to his coach and tells him to chill.

    UConn's Jim Calhoun is freaking out, convinced that the freshman who's never been afraid of "The Dragon" has finally met a moment he cannot match. Calhoun desperately wants to find the right words to calm Shabazz Napier, to tell him not to worry about the turnover that almost cost the Huskies their season, the miss dribble that almost ended Kemba Walker's marvelous run. Napier still has to be carrying that, right?

    It happened only a moment ago and UConn just barely dodged disaster when DeAndre Liggins — Kentucky's best outside shooter — missed a 3-pointer. Surely, Shabazz is spooked.

    "I was so concerned during the timeout that he'd be so concerned about losing the basketball, dribbling into traffic," Calhoun says later. "He looked straight at me and said, 'Coach, I'll make up for it on the next play.' What am I going to say?"

    Nothing. Napier has this, sinking two clutch free throws to salt away UConn's 56-55 win over Kentucky, to make the only buzzer beater of the night mean nothing. It's that kind of night at Reliant Stadium.

    The Final Four returns to Houston for the first time in 40 years and it's no big stress. It's a major event sure, one that brought out George and Barbara Bush and Ashley Judd too. But this is Houston. We do big events all the time.

    This isn't Indianapolis. Houston does not need a Final Four to validate it.

    That might have been the case when the Super Bowl came to town in 2004, when it seemed like the whole world came with it and nothing else in the city mattered. But seven years later?

    We've got this. It will be flawlessly executed and everyone will leave happy. If not exactly completely thrilled. That's the thing about this semifinal Saturday, about Butler over VCU 70-62 and UConn's gut check.

    The games were close, but not exactly electric.

    Houston set the all-time Final Four attendance record with 75,421 fans in the building. But it wasn't exactly difficult to get a ticket. You didn't have to be an oil tycoon to afford a good seat. The average Shell worker could have easily been sitting in the lower bowl for a few hundred dollars.

    Excuse a few if they're wondering what all the fuss is about right now too.

    "To be honest," first-time Final Four-attendee Gary Larson says, looking around Reliant, at all the people and the raised sparkling Space City tribute floor. "We had more fun at the Big Dance concert."

    The NCAA may be putting on the first Final Four where the free concerts draw more word-of-mouth than the games themselves. That's both a compliment and a curse.

    For the NCAA's long fretted over the idea that relatively few people who actually live in the towns where it holds its mega college basketball events get into the actual games. The organization's put in wonderful programs to try and counteract that, from the free A-list musical acts to the Sunday afternoon Final Four Dribble event that guarantees any kid who signed up a free T-shirt and free admission to Bracket Town.

    Now that there's finally a Final Four where almost anyone with some disposable income can get into though, enough people may not want to go. And Monday night presents an even greater challenge.

     Star Power Outage

    Kentucky carried Reliant on Saturday. From the rafters, the giant stadium looked like a sea of blue. At court level, it sounded much the same.

    "We're used to playing in front of large crowds at home," Wildcats forward Josh Harrellson says. "We sell out every game, 24,000. This was triple that."

    And it seemed like two thirds of them were from Kentucky, surely felt like that when they screamed at opposing star Kemba Walker. The UConn section looked rather embarrassing as the notion that the school simply doesn't travel was reinforced.

    "I saw a few students from my classes," Huskies center Alexi Oriakhi insists. "It says something that they came all this way."

    It says they left a whole lot of people at home too.

    The crowd news didn't get much better in the earlier semifinal either. Butler — for all its sudden history, despite the fact that the Bulldogs could be considered the legitimate favorite in Monday night's national championship game — is not the Boston Red Sox. The school's enrollment is under 5,000.

    VCU fans — who finally started believing in their team three NCAA Tournament sites too late — easily overpowered the Butler crowd. So the bigger draw in each of the semifinal games is gone, beaten by a tougher team.

    No one shows that toughness more than Walker, the breakout story of this tournament. He's so much of a better, more complete player than the fawned over Jimmer Fredette, who's been in Houston this week, doing what a marquee attraction who doesn't have a game to play does.

    Kemba has more pressing matters, championship matters.

    And there UConn's 6-foot-1 blurring flash of a determination is, standing on wobbly legs as Kentucky tries to make its comeback, in arguably the only NCAA Tournament game in history when the clock never seemed to get stopped.

    But after giving UConn everything he had, Walker's still trying to do more, telling Napier "You'd better make these" before the freshman steps to the line. See, Kemba knows what Calhoun forgot.

    The freshman is at his best when he thinks someone else is freaking over him. That's why he is the only player Calhoun can remember who brushes off the coach when he's in full "dragon" mode, spewing spittle in a jersey.

    "Shabazz will throw a crazy pass out of bounds and tell me with a straight face, 'He should have had it,' " Calhoun laughs. "And I'll say, 'But you threw it 10 feet over his head.' The other guy should have had it."

    Napier shrugs in the locker room. You don't chose to wear No. 13 if you're not fearless.

    "As long as Oriakhi didn't say anything to me I knew I'd be all right," Napier says. "Because he always makes me crack up. And you don't want to be laughing in that situation."

    You don't want to be laughing at this Final Four either. There's still the chance for what Jim Nantz is already calling, "The greatest upset story ever in college basketball." It's still major power versus a small school. The opportunity still exists for a classic championship game to make up for the good, but not great ones on Saturday night.

    And maybe best yet, Houstonians figure to be the ones filling a lot of those seats left empty by the Kentucky horde and the VCU late believers.

    UConn has some pathetic fans. Butler just isn't that big. No problem.

    Houston's got this. Like usual.

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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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