Unlike the Super Bowl, Houston will get to host another Final Four in the near future.
Detroit set the previous record in 2009, but the Final Four at Reliant Stadium established a new standard for the event’s highest total attendance — 145,747.
Those numbers were much more palatable than the ones posted by Connecticut and Butler on Monday during a universally panned title game won by the Huskies 53-41.
But not even a lackluster final could dampen the enthusiasm generated in a city that hadn’t hosted the Final Four in 40 years.
“This is what a showcase, what a national championship should feel like,” NCAA interim executive vice president of championships Greg Shaheen said Tuesday. “It was exactly what we hoped it would be.”
Which is good for Houston, since the Final Four returns in 2016. A regional will be held at Reliant in 2015.
My office is walking distance from Reliant, and I didn’t feel disrupted by the presence of the Final Four. I’ll be happy to see it come back in five years. In the meantime, I anxiously await word about how those economic projections turned out. For once, I hope they all underestimated.
It ain’t like the NCAA is gonna listen to me, but I think having tournament games in these whacking big arenas screws up the shooting percentages. The backdrops for the baskets are entirely different from what the players normally see, and I think their depth perception is thrown off.
Unrelated: I solved my blog email problem with some help from the MT forum. It took about 8 hours to get a suggestion there, but it pointed me in the right direction.