Each day this week during the regional rounds of the NCAA Tournament we’re asking some of our top correspondents to put together a collection of notes and interesting tidbits about each region.  If you know of something that we should include in tomorrow’s submission, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Butler (Andrew Murawa)

• If you didn’t already have plenty of reasons to root for the Bulldogs this weekend, how about the fact that senior forward Avery Jukes has already formed a foundation dedicated to aiding poor children and helping them with their education.  I don’t know about you, but when I was 22 the foundation I was most interested in starting in my name likely had Beer Fund at the title.
• The question remains about how big of a home-court advantage Butler will have this weekend. The Horizon League commissioner Jon LeCrone thinks it will be, well, substantial.
• For those Bulldog fans that aren’t able to get inside Lucas Oil Stadium for the games, they can head over to Hinkle Fieldhouse for a viewing party, with donations supporting the Jukes Foundation.
• But if you do need tickets, don’t go trying to look up Brad Stevens, as he has already passed the “ticket business” on down the line.
• As great of an accomplishment as the Final Four is, Stevens claims that the Bulldogs going undefeated in the Horizon League was their biggest feat of the year. So what if he’s about the only one who thinks that?
• Not only is this Bulldog team in the Final Four, they are also a very young team, with only two contributing seniors on the squad and a trio of sophomores who were largely overlooked in the recruiting process.

West Virginia (Ryan Restivo of SienaSaintsBlog)

• A West Virginia fan had a very interesting fan experience early in March, but made sure to watch Villanova-West Virginia on March 6 before checking in to the hospital for a heart attack. USA Today notes, she got a surprise visit from Da’Sean Butler.
• It’s been a little over two years since Duke and WVU met in the NCAA Tournament, and both teams feel that they have matured in the interim.
• WVU Alum Bob Huggins has brought the Mountaineers to the top.
• Meanwhile The Philadelphia Inquirer notes the Mountaineers’ strength is rebounding and defense.
• Bucky Waters, who was head coach  at Duke and West Virginia, expects a good game.

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Each day this week during the regional rounds of the NCAA Tournament we’re asking some of our top correspondents to put together a collection of notes and interesting tidbits about each region.  If you know of something that we should include in tomorrow’s submission, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Butler (Andrew Murawa)

• While Butler playing in the Final Four is undoubtedly good for Bulldog fans, there is some question of whether it is good financially for Indianapolis.
• John Gasaway at Basketball Prospectus says that Matt Howard staying out of foul trouble is not nearly as important as  you would think, but that Butler forcing turnovers is.
• For the Sporting News’ Ryan Fagan, Gordon Hayward is the most important piece of the puzzle for the Bulldogs, and the most important player in the Final Four.
• Gregg Doyel thinks this may be the year that a mid-major (or Cinderella, or just plain old “smaller school”), in the form of these Bulldogs, wins the title.
• But Detroit Mercy head coach Ray McCallum thinks there may be a script for beating Butler; the question is whether anyone can follow that script, something his Titans failed to do this season.
• ESPN’s Tim Keown has an interesting comparison of the approaches that Butler and Kentucky take towards their programs, with the Bulldogs (mostly by necessity) building piece by piece for the future while Kentucky (and more specifically, John Calipari) relies on short-term superstars.

Duke (Patrick Sellars)

• The Bleacher Report puts their own spin on a preview of the Duke Blue Devils.
• An article from the Star Tribune discusses how Duke ruined the Final Four because they are the only unlikable team in the mix.
• Here’s an article from the Miami-Herald on why people despise Duke, and apparently it starts with Coach K. I suppose the rest of the ACC hating on Duke continues into the offseason.
• Want to know who the best white Duke player of all time was? Well now you can! Thank God Josh McRoberts missed the list.

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With Butler’s magical run through the West Region to make its first-ever Final Four in its home city of Indianapolis, it got us thinking about whether having home court advantage this deep in the Tournament actually means anything.  It’s great to have the fan support on your side, but when you get this far into the season, all of the teams remaining have won games in hostile environments and are still standing for a more compelling reason (they’re really good!).

We decided to take a historical look at some situations in the last fifty years of the Final Four where we feel that there could have been a home court advantage of some kind for the Final Four and Championship Games.  We tried to limit our choices to a three-hour driving radius from the host venue, but we recognize that some fanbases will travel to the moon to see their team while others can’t be trifled with moving off the couch.  So bear with us.

A brief review found seventeen such instances in the last half-century (Butler @ Indy is #18).  Of special note is that there were only seven situations where a team got to play in its home state (including last year’s Michigan State @ Detroit situation) and only twice where a Final Four school played its games in its home city as Butler will do this coming weekend (UCLA both times).  Here’s the list of what you really want to know, and we’ll break down each instance below that to determine if we think HCA had an impact. 

Final Fours Involving Home Teams

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Each day this week during the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament we’re asking some of our top correspondents to put together a collection of notes and interesting tidbits about each team still alive.  If you know of something that we should include in tomorrow’s submission, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Michigan State (Tom Hager)

• Big Surprise: Tom Izzo will not be leaving Michigan State for an Oregon team that finished 7-11 in the Pac-10.
• Butler may have the advantage of the home crowd in Indianapolis, but Bulldogs coach Brad Stevens believes that MSU may have a large portion of the crowd pulling for the Spartans as well.
• According to the New York Times, the harder Durrell Summers worked on his defensive game, the easier his offensive production has come by.
• Seth Davis says that toughness, a category that MSU excels in given their rebounding ability, is the most important asset to have on a team at this time of the season.
• Delvon Roe is expected to be in the starting lineup despite a knee injury.  According to the team trainer, Roe has an unbelievable pain tolerance.

West Virginia (Ryan Restivo of SienaSaintsBlog)

• West Virginia, the Wall Street Journal noted, overcame a slow start to make the Final Four.
• Are there any stars in this year’s Final Four?
• Bob Huggins is not sure if Truck Bryant will be ready to go on Saturday. “I don’t have any idea,” Huggins said. “We’re not going to go today and we really won’t know until we see what he can do (Tuesday) and Wednesday and how he progresses.” However, Huggins told USA Today that they will explore every opportunity to play Bryant.
• West Virginia’s odds are interesting for this year’s Final Four.
• Mike DeCourcy writes that John Beilein’s holdovers and Huggins’ players combined to take this team to the next level.

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RTC was in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the West Regional over the weekend.  Here are some of the sights, sounds and impressions of the town, the games and the goings-on while we were there.

SLC Sits Right Next to Those Imposing Mountains

The Trip There.  You have to love air travel sometimes.  Not so much the security lines, the crying children always scheduled one row behind me or the petulant TSA morons who keep stealing my Right Guard deodorant gel, but the whole concept of it.  At 12:30 pm, I was sitting in my office next to the deep blue waters of the Pacific; by 5 pm, I was sitting in a green seat in Utah’s Delta Center EnergySolutions Arena watching the West Regional Semifinals tip off between Syracuse and Butler.  When air travel works with such efficiency as that, it still amazes me.  Too bad it’s so infrequent these days.

When I landed, I noticed two things immediately.  Everything was white: the air, the mountains, even the people.  Ok, especially the people.  I think the only two nonwhite folks I encountered in SLC the entire weekend were my cab drivers to and from the airport.  It’s fairly clear with such a glaring lack of diversity in the area why NBA stars in particular look at signing with the Jazz as equivalent to hoops purgatory.  Well, except the white ones (Andrei Kirilenko, Mehmet Okur, Kyle Korver, etc.).  The other thing I noticed was that it was cold.  As in still-winter type of cold.  Snow was on the mountaintops that tower right over the downtown, and here I was with a lightweight hoodie as my only form of jacket.  I should have probably checked the weather report before I left, but I made the self-centered presumption that every place is like where I am now, right?  And if it’s not, it most definitely should be.

Jazz Heroes Stockton & Malone Outside the Arena

Thursday Night Games.  Tickets were aplenty outside the arena for this set of games.  The closest school (K-State) was over 1,000 miles away, and the tip was right after 5 pm local time.  That said, once I entered the arena, the place looked nearly full.  It seats about 20,000 and the announced attendance both days was in the 17-18,000 range .  I couldn’t get an immediate sense as to which school brought the most fans because it appeared that there were smatterings of orange (Syracuse), purple (K-State), navy blue (Xavier) and black (Butler) around the arena, but more than anything else, I noticed red everywhere.  Quickly checking the google to see if any of these four schools had red anywhere in their complementary color schemes and finding not, I decided that this warranted further investigation.

It turns out that many of the red hats, shirts, coats and so on were emblazoned with a strange word called “Utah,” which makes a lot of sense considering that the UofU campus is a mere two miles up the hill from downtown, but was completely lost on me because I couldn’t factor in that the Utes didn’t make the Tournament this year.  I didn’t expect that they’d have so many fans who just wanted to watch some good basketball.  I ran into that all weekend long here.  The good people of Utah LOVE their basketball.  From the youth league level all the way up to the Jazz, they’re extremely supportive of the sport and have a keen appreciation and knowledge of the game.  This is in stark contrast to some of the other neutral-site venues where I’ve visited this year and it barely even registers with the locals that there’s something called March Madness going on down the street.  In fact, I’d wager that the majority of attendees in the ES Arena over the weekend were simply folks from the surrounding area who wanted to watch the games.  I can only imagine the homecourt advantage that BYU would have held there had they gotten past Kansas State in the second round.

Two of the More Interesting Getups We Saw in SLC

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We’re down to the Four.  Here are some of the thoughts we had about the last couple of days of games while looking ahead to next weekend in Indy…

Forget the Seedings, These Teams Are Good. With a #1, #2 and two #5 seeds making the Final Four this year, the immediate reaction is that we’ve got a wide-open bracket with the potential for a true Cinderella to cut down the nets this year.  Closer examination, however, reveals that all of the four teams left standing were thought pretty highly of in the preseason.  In both the AP and Coaches Polls, Michigan State was ranked #2 behind Kansas, while Duke, West Virginia and Butler all populated the top ten as well (Butler was #11 in the AP).  So while it may have taken some time for Izzo’s Spartans to get it together (like seemingly every year), they eventually did and they’re playing well enought to be a worthy Final Four participant; the same is definitely true for Butler, penalized by the pollsters and Selection Committee for early losses in November and December, but who is playing as well as anyone left right now.  It’s difficult to lose the mindset that a team is a Cinderella or not based on its Tourney seed, but the truth is that these four teams are all playing like #1 and #2 seeds and they have the talent to back it up.

You Can't Get Rid of This Guy (DFP/J. Gonzalez)

Izzo the Stray Cat.  Tom Izzo is like the stray cat in your neighborhood that you can’t get to stay off your front stoop no matter how hard you try.  Just when you think he’s out of your hair for good, he shows up again with that Cheshire grin belying his belief that he’s the luckiest dude alive.  Six Final Fours in twelve years is one better than it was last year (five in eleven), and yet everyone acts completely shocked and amazed that he’s back in the Four with much the same group of players.  How weak are people’s memories?  This is what Izzo does — this trip will make the second time that his team  has reached the final weekend as a #5 seed — and it’s not a mere coincidence.  Everyone knew that he had the talent this season (see above re: preseason ranking), but all of the turmoil surrounding player roles and injuries led people (including us) to believe he wasn’t going to be able to find the combinations to get it done again.  Here’s a bracketing lesson for all of us next year and the years beyond that: Wherever Michigan State is seeded, just put the Spartans in the Final Four and don’t look back.  Your odds are much better doing it that way than actually trying to analyze the matchups and break down the games.  Izzo is a March master, and how anyone can doubt this guy’s abilities is beyond comprehension.

Butler is No George Mason.  To a casual fan, he sees that Butler is in the Final Four this weekend and he’s thinking George Mason all over again.  This lazy thinking is a serious mistake.  Mason was an #11 seed who benefited from catching two teams by surprise in the first two rounds, followed by veritable home games in DC against another Cindy Wichita State in the regional semis and an uber-talented but frustratingly underachieving UConn team in the regional finals.  They deserve all the credit they can muster for winning those games, without question, but things broke well for them to make the run possible.  Butler had to play and beat the top two seeds in its region to make the Final Four this year, and they did it by forcing both Syracuse and Kansas State to bend to their style of play and make numerous atypical mistakes.  Butler’s defense subjugated two of the most efficient offenses in America into their worst performances of the year, and that’s no more a coincidence than Izzo above still having games to play.  Andy Rautins, Scoop Jardine, Denis Clemente and Jacob Pullen (combined 20-52 FGs) are undoubtedly still having nightmares of Butler defenders securing temporary eminent domain over their jockstraps.  The key takeaway here is that Butler will defend Michigan State just like the others, and if they can find enough offense themselves through Gordon Hayward, Shelvin Mack and friends, they are plenty good enough to continue to advance.

Butler Can Win This Thing, Folks (IndyStar)

Bob Huggins, White Knight. One thing we noticed traveling around over the weekend was that every hoophead around the country was unilaterally rooting for West Virginia to take out John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats on Saturday night.  In the sports bar we were in during that game, Syracuse, Butler, K-State and Xavier fans were teamed up pulling for the Mountaineers.  We’ve picked up similar anecdotes from around the country since then — nobody wanted Kentucky to win that game.  We believe that this sentiment derives from a general feeling that Calipari is a dirty coach who cheats to get his players, but the irony of everyone outside of the Bluegrass backing Bob Huggins wasn’t lost on us.  Since when is tHuggins Huggins the white knight here to save college basketball from agents, cheaters and bags full of money?  Surely people remember his endless problems at Cincinnati with players failing to graduate, numerous asundry brushes with the law, and failing to exert institutional control?  No?  Look, we get that people don’t like Calipari and, by proxy, Kentucky; but isn’t Huggins quite possibly worse given the history of lawlessness on his teams?

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Rush the Court’s Zach Hayes will deliver a breakdown of each Final Four team every day this week. We begin the dissection with the hometown Butler Bulldogs and their quest to cut down the nets in the shadow of their campus.

Crucial Tourney Moment(s): Butler faced two potentially back-breaking moments during their West regional bouts with Syracuse and Kansas State. Wesley Johnson and Denis Clemente both nailed second half threes that relinquished healthy Butler leads. Rather than follow the script of most Cinderella’s at this stage in the season, Butler battled back from both setbacks with clutch baskets from unsung heroes Willie Veasley and Ronald Nored. Their stingy halfcourt defense buckled down, forced turnovers and shut down both Johnson and Clemente down the stretch of both contests.

Advantage Area: Butler employs a stingy and disruptive halfcourt defense, one that permits you to run your sets but rarely allows dribble penetration, effectively doubles against screens to limit open looks against opposing guards and forces a plethora of turnovers. Butler frustrated a Syracuse offense running on all cylinders into 18 turnovers on Thursday. Butler also crashes the boards with all five of their players on the floor, evident by guard Shelvin Mack garnering nearly four rebounds per game. The Bulldogs ranked sixth in the country during the season limiting offensive rebounds for their opponents. They may be able to neutralize the backboards against Michigan State, usually an area of strength for Tom Izzo’s teams. An even stiffer test follows in this area with either Duke or West Virginia.

Potential Downfall: Butler could have a difficult time defending in the post. Matt Howard, a forward known for his propensity to commit fouls, and Gordon Hayward, a more perimeter-oriented player who does manage to hold his own down low, are Brad Stevens’ tallest players at 6’8. If Howard is forced to the bench, the only other option Stevens can point to is solid defender Avery Jukes. It’s a position of definite weakness on the defensive end and Kansas State’s Curtis Kelly exploited the flaw quite well during their Elite 8 battle. Unfortunately for Butler, each of the other Final 4 teams excels in the paint, especially Duke and West Virginia should the Bulldogs advance. West Virginia is one of the tallest teams in the nation and Duke hits the boards with ferocity as any viewer of their regional final matchup with Baylor can attest.

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We did this last week and it seemed to work pretty well, so let’s do it again.  Here are five questions from the past weekend’s action with a look ahead to the Final Four. Each of the below polls will allow comments, so let’s build some discussion through there.

Q1: What Was the Biggest Surprise This Weekend?

We’re going with Mazzulla on this one.  He came into the game averaging a bucket per contest, yet he shredded the Kentucky defense for easy layups multiple times over the course of WVU’s win over the Wildcats.  Many of the others were also surprising, and if we had to choose a #2, it would probably be Butler defeating Syracuse and K-State.  Not so much because we don’t believe in the Bulldogs (we do!), but just because how methodically they shut down the guards of both of those elite teams.

Q2: Butler: Cinderella or Legit Championship Threat?

We’d be more inclined to think they were a legitimate championship threat if they didn’t have to face a team in Michigan State that thrives on street fight defense.  It’ll be just another day at the Big Ten office for the Spartans in playing the Bulldogs, and there’s no way that Tom Izzo will allow his team to look past them.

Q3: Was JP Prince’s Foul on Raymar Morgan Legit?

Yeah, it was.  We’ve slowed it down a few times and there was enough arm in addition to ball there to warrant the call.  The mistake was letting MSU beat the Vols down the court to the blocks.  If UT had gotten back better, they might still be playing.

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Each day this week during the regional rounds of the NCAA Tournament we’re asking some of our top correspondents to put together a collection of notes and interesting tidbits about each region.  If you know of something that we should include in tomorrow’s submission, hit us up at rushthecourt@yahoo.com.

Michigan State (Tom Hager)

• Michigan State’s victory on Sunday is not without controversy.  Tennessee’s J.P. Prince, who committed the crucial foul with less than two seconds left, went over to the scorer’s table after the game and said that he did not believe there was a foul.
• Although this is Tom Izzo’s sixth trip to the Final Four in twelve years, he makes sure not to take it for granted.  According to Izzo, reaching the Final Four is the greatest aspect of coaching because of the work involved in getting there.
• The trip to the semifinals is even more impressive considering former MSU star Magic Johnson did not even believe that this was a Final Four team a month ago.
• Perhaps the reason for Izzo’s success is his perfectionist attitude.  During one point in the game on Sunday, Draymond Green asked if he could make a mistake, and Izzo told him not at this crucial time of year.
• Kalin Lucas is still the hero for Michigan State, as fans chanted his name and players carried him up to the rim to cut the nets.

Duke (Patrick Sellars)

• The Washington Post looks at the brotherhood of the Duke Blue Devils in this article. Coach K has a team back in the Final Four for the first time since 2004.
• Was Scott Drew’s coaching inexperience exposed in the Elite Eight matchup Sunday? Here is a look at how Drew may have cost Baylor the game and a shot at the Final Four.
• Everyone is happy in Durham. Jon Scheyer said “It’s a dream come true. To get that win, we had to work our butts off for it, and it felt great.”
• There was a lot of emotion in the Baylor locker room after their loss on Sunday. It was a sad end to a dream season. “You don’t want it to end,” a teary-eyed Tweety Carter said, “and you want to do whatever it takes to make it go on.”

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After 59 mostly amazing NCAA Tournament games, we are down to the last two before we head to Indianapolis for the Final Four. Butler and West Virginia have already sealed trips to Indianapolis, but there are still two more tickets waiting to be punched. One Elite 8 match-up (the South) features a pair of teams–Duke and Baylor–that nobody is really surprised to see here. The other Elite 8 match-up (the Midwest) features two teams–Michigan State and Tennessee–that were expected to contend for a Final Four spot at the beginning of the season, but basically fell off the map during parts of the season only to be miraculously resurrected. Either way all four are just one win away from making the trip to the promised land: the Final Four.

We will kick things off at 2 PM and follow both Elite 8 games:

• 2:20 PM: #5 Michigan State versus #6 Tennessee
• 5:05 PM: #1 Duke versus #3 Baylor

So stop by to hear ground-breaking analysis, chat with fellow hoops heads, and ask us any questions you have about all things basketball.

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