RTC is in Indianapolis this weekend, and except for an odd occurrence involving BiaH and an amputee stripper (we kid, we kid…), things here have gone swimmingly. One of the best things about Final Four Saturday is that the games don’t start until a little after 6 pm local time, so all the fans congregate downtown in a disorganized yet ebullient manner to eat, drink and rabble-rouse throughout the afternoon. Downtown Indianapolis is perfectly suited for this type of event because there are literally dozens of restaurants and bars within easy walking distance of Lucas Oil Stadium, and many of them have patios and outdoor seating areas for people to hang out. We spent a couple of hours walking around talking to fans of the four participating schools, and you’ll forgive us if we were easily sidetracked a couple of times. Here’s our video diary from Saturday.

We first stumbled across two Indiana fans who have adopted the hometown team Butler Bulldogs as their favorite for the weekend. Their frankness with respect to Tom Crean’s Hoosiers was, well, enlightening. And we love them for it.

Next we came across a group of Michigan State fans who had attached a stuffed Bulldog to a pole outside a restaurant and were encouraging passers-by to take a swing at it as they came by. This was a fun group who clearly loved their Spartans (and a certain amber liquid).

Duke fans weren’t all that well represented in Indy on Saturday (probably about 10-15% of the total), but these two ladies from Cincinnati were there fully decked out with their Blue Devil gear on and quite confident in Coach K’s team’s prospects for the rest of the weekend.

You’ll forgive us for this brief interlude with the Captain Morgan team, although, we’re just wondering… are the bimbos allowed to talk? We think not.

Moving on, we came across some West Virginia students who had driven in the night before and were anticipating a repeat of the Mountaineer win over Duke in the NCAAs two years ago. Their spokesperson was extremely nice, but we thought of him during the second half last night.

This scalper (who requested that we not show his face) told us that the market for Final Four tickets was in the $500-$2,000 range. That is significantly more than what we paid for our tickets later that afternoon.

There’s a rotten egg in every basket, and although the Spartan fan who was our interviewee seemed nice enough and willing to talk to us, his friend who came out of nowhere was a complete buffoon. We’re really hoping he sees this so that he can “learn the law” himself.

A second group of Butler fans that we ran into were extremely confident in their team’s chances, stating that MSU was “only a five” (seed). Hilarious, and right!

After that, it was time to head into the game. You guys already know what happened there, but we got a couple of interesting clips inside the building. The first two give you a sense as to what the stadium looks and feels like from on high both before and during the game. The third is a clip of an old fan favorite signing some autographs.

We didn’t get video of this, but we did ask Dickie V. what he thought about Expansion 96. His response: “hate it.” When we asked if it was going to happen, he said it was a done deal and that it would indeed be 96 teams. He didn’t seem very pleased at all with it. To which we say, thanks Dickie V. Seriously. Sometimes he goes too far in protecting his coaching fraternity buddies, but he’s of course spot-on about this one.

rtmsf (3998 Posts)

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 7:22 pm by rtmsf and is filed under 2010 ncaa tournament. Tagged: butler, duke, final four, michigan st, ncaa tournament, west virginia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.