Kaminsky: “It’s an insane venue”
Even 30 years ago, college basketballwas ready to stretch its legs.
When the Final Four arrived inDenver in 1990, the Mile High City welcomed the NCAA Tournament’s grand finale with open arms. And, save for a fewrainy days, it went offwithout a hitch. Downtown streets were flooded with fans and McNichols Sports Arena burst at the seams forUNLV’s historic rout of Duke in the championship game.
But even as Denverites basked in the glowof the wildly successfulweek, a bittersweet feeling had already begun to permeate. The city had just made a close friend it knew wouldn’t be back to visit.
“There was a belief then thatmost of the Final Fours in the futurewould be in domed stadiums,” Roger Kinney, chairman of the Denver Organizing Committee, told The Denver Post in 1989, reflecting on his group’s ambitious work to win the bid five years earlier. “Ifwe hadwaited a fewyears, Denver probably never would have gotten the tournament.”
Not unless the Broncos have a secret plan to put a roof on Sports Authority Field at Mile High.
College basketball now is a football-only business when it comes to venues for its grand tournament. Only two Final Fours have been played inside a basketball arena since 1990— the most recentwas played at Continental Airlines Arena at theMeadowlands in EastRutherford, N.J., in 1996— and Denver is the last city with a sub-20,000seat arena (17,675) to host the event.
As the popularity of the Final Four has grown, so too has the size of the stadiums that host it. And they don’t comeany bigger than AT&T Stadium, the $1 billion home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys in Arlington, Texas. It’s the site of this year’s Final Four.
Organizers sold enough tickets to fill the base capacity of 77,000 per session, but that didn’t include an undetermined number of standing-room-only tickets. Saturday’s at- tendancewas a record 79,444. The previous attendance record for the Final Four was 75,421 for the semifinals at Houston’s Reliant Stadium in 2011.
“AT&T Stadium takes the dome to a whole newlevel,” said Greg Anthony, a former UNLV star who is serving as a color analyst for TBS and CBS at the Final Four. “You could fit most other domes inside it. It’s the most massive structure I have ever seen.”
Anthony has a unique perspective on Final Four venues. As a junior guard on UNLV’s 1990 championship team, he cut down the nets inside McNichols Arena. The next year, the Runnin’ Rebels returned to the Final Four, which was played inside the far-less-intimate RCA Dome in Indianapolis in front of nearly three times the crowd.
“Initially, it was different,” Anthony said during a conference call last week. “You really sensed it more the day before the game, on the court and in practice, because it was so cavernous.”
Opinions differ as towhether the venues have become too big. When the Final Four moved exclusively to football stadiums in the late 1990s, curtains were draped in them to cap attendance in the range of 45,000. Now the curtains have fallen and crowds have grown. Attendance at the Final Four has topped 70,000 per session every year since 2009.
Adapting to such an environment can be hard for the players.
“It kind of feels like we’re outside to a point,” Wisconsin star Frank Kaminsky said after practicing at AT&T Stadium. “If you look through the backboard, it seems like everything is so far away. It’s an insane venue. I think it’s too big, honestly.”
Steve Kerr agrees. The former Arizona star, who calls the Final Four alongside Anthony and play-by-play man Jim Nantz, pines for the days when the games were played in basketball venues.
“Basketball wasmeant to be played in an arena, in a gym,” Kerr said. “Not in a football stadium.”
Others see themove into ever bigger venues as a necessary evolution to grow the sport, as much as they may prefer the true basketball arena.
Take veteran coach Tubby Smith, who counts Madison Square Garden in New York as one of his favorite places to experience basketball. He feels the soul of the game in a place like that. And he has seen countless nights during his 35-year college career when a packed, rumbling-at-itsfoundation gym becomes a character all its own, a placewhere fans sit on top of the action rather than watching it on a 50-yardslong HD JumboTron from their seats high above the court.
But as a longtime board member of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, the Texas Tech coach embraces the move to massive venues such asAT&TStadium. They’re big enough to house an enormous amount of fans, sure. But they also provide room for a growing number of coaches, assistants, administrators and directors from nearly every level of basketball to network, share ideas and figure out ways to improve the game.
“When Iwas on theNABC board, we had to fight to keep tickets for coaches,” Smith said. “Now these big arenas can accommodate everybody fromsponsors, to coaches, boosters, alumni and fans. ... You have the opportunity to talk about the state of the game with all the entities thatmake up this great sport. It is the most importantweek in basketball.”
For theKentucky, Wisconsin, Florida and Connecticut teams, the dimensions on the court were the same Saturday night. Tenfoot-high rims. Ninety-four feet of hardwood. Everything else around them, though, has become larger than life.