Commentary: Big names abound at Final Four

By Tim Dahlberg - Associated Press Sports Columnist     Mar 31, 2007

? Gonzaga was always a good story about the little college that could, until George Mason came along and made it even better. There’s nothing like a spirited underdog in the NCAA Tournament to remind us of simpler times when players enrolled for four years and anything seemed possible.

The best players don’t stick around long anymore, and there’s nothing simple about a tournament that has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry. Everything is sponsored and everything has a price, from the coaches on down to the paper cups at courtside.

Purists may cringe, but those are the same people who picked Belmont in their office pool. The rest understand that there’s a reason both Ohio State and Florida not only played for the BCS football championship, but also are in the Final Four.

In the case of Ohio State there are 102 million reasons, the same as the dollars the school is spending on its athletic program this year. For that kind of money, the Buckeyes could buy Weber State and still have enough left over for a good down payment on Winthrop.

College basketball is big business, and in business the rich usually get richer. And that doesn’t just apply to Billy Donovan, who figures to get a whole lot richer before he sees the inside of a gym again.

Money, of course, doesn’t mean everything. If it did, George Mason wouldn’t have gotten past the first round last year, much less made a run into the Final Four.

The argument could be made that what is really important is playing in a tough conference, such as the one Georgetown took so many lumps in that it fell out of the Top 25 before rebounding for a big stretch run.

But it shouldn’t really be much surprise that there are few surprises remaining in this Final Four. That was pretty much determined by last weekend, when Oregon was the lowest seed in the round of eight at No. 3, and No. 7 UNLV was what passed for a long shot in the regional semifinals.

A tournament marked by unpredictability has been all too predictable, with two No. 1 seeds and two No. 2 seeds making it to college basketball’s promised land.

Let UCLA coach Ben Howland talk about parity in college basketball being such that any team can beat any other team on a given day. That may be true on a Thursday night in January in Corvallis, Ore., but not in March when the alumni are really paying attention and the big teams are loaded with talent that can overcome a lot of mistakes.

Last year may have been the year of the mid-major, an unfortunate term that has come into popularity in recent times for Division I teams that don’t belong to one of the seven power conferences. But look closely, and there were really only eight to 12 teams in this year’s tournament that had much of a chance to get to Atlanta.

Actually, make that nine to 13 because had Southern Illinois held a lead against Kansas, the Salukis would have been right in the middle of a defensive bruiser against UCLA. But the brackets were seeded so well by the often maligned NCAA selection committee that it’s hard to imagine a Boston College, or even an Xavier, making it this far.

Which may not be all that bad. This could be the highest rated Final Four in recent years, if only for the fact that the average fan who tends to pick favorites in his pool probably has two or three teams still in action and will tune in just to cheer them on.

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