FanHouse FinalFour

DETROIT -- Maybe it's his folksy arrogance, the Huckleberry Hound-with-an-attitude rub. Maybe it was the way he lectured TV reporter Bonnie Bernstein, saying, "I could give a (bleep) about Carolina right now" when she asked about his future plans after his 2003 national title-game loss. Maybe it was the Kansas button he wore last year, a weird show of allegiance for an ex-employer in the championship game after the Jayhawks had whipped his Tar Heels.

Or maybe America simply is growing weary of North Carolina, the powder bluebloods who dominate April like azaleas at Augusta and fools on the 1st.

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DETROIT -- Somewhere on the Road to the Final Four, which once it finally gets to this championship round is called The Road Ends Here, should have been some guys holding placards that read: "Hooping for a Cause."

They should've been wearing Michigan State green and North Carolina blue. They should've been Spartans and Tar Heels led by Tom Izzo and Roy Williams. They should've been the two teams that survived to Monday night's title game.

Most survivors to the championship game are motivated simply by the title of champion at the end of the journey. These two teams are as well.

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Tom Izzo has used words like "enigma" and "challenging" to describe Raymar Morgan. He has spoken of the difficulty he's had in finding the multi-talented junior forward to keep his mood up, and to play with consistency. In a year of challenges overcome at Michigan State, Morgan has represented one of Izzo's most persistent coaching conundrums.

But after Morgan went off for 18 points, nine rebounds and five steals Saturday night in the Spartans' national semifinal victory over Connecticut, the word Izzo used to describe Morgan was short and simple: "Best."

DETROIT -- If you really think about it, to call the North Carolina basketball team Tar Heels has always been more of an oxymoron. Michael Jordan. Walter Davis. Bob McAdoo. Vince Carter. James Worthy. On and on. You think of them and you think smooth. You think finesse. You think of a pretty way of playing.

It isn't that Jordan and Carter and lots of other North Carolina basketball players weren't tough, but you don't think of them as the 19th century North Carolinians who burned trees into black muck, or tar, that they then spread on the bottom of boats. You don't think of them as part of that North Carolina Civil War lore -- the wrong and losing side, by the way -- where a Confederate troop leader pleaded with his boys to fight with the toughness of those North Carolinians he'd heard about, those Tar Heels.

At least not until now.

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DETROIT -- If you really think about it, to call the North Carolina basketball team Tar Heels has always been more of an oxymoron. Michael Jordan. Walter Davis. Bob McAdoo. Vince Carter. James Worthy. On and on. You think of them and you think smooth. You think finesse. You think of a pretty way of playing.

It isn't that Jordan and Carter and lots of other North Carolina basketball players weren't tough, but you don't think of them as the 19th century North Carolinians who burned trees into black muck, or tar, that they then spread on the bottom of boats. You don't think of them as part of that North Carolina Civil War lore -- the wrong and losing side, by the way -- where a Confederate troop leader pleaded with his boys to fight with the toughness of those North Carolinians he'd heard about, those Tar Heels.

At least not until now.

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DETROIT -- On command, when a local kid named Durrell Summers lifted off and nearly decapitated Stanley Robinson with a vicious dunk, a moving wave of green-swept humanity rose and rocked. Yes, your honor, this was a ridiculous homecourt advantage, a home-FIELD advantage of about 45,000 local crazies in a 72,500-seat football stadium, an advantage in ways freakishly unprecedented in the fiercely neutral extravaganza known as the Final Four.

Ford Field is guilty as charged.

And not a soul with a conscience should complain about it.

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As discussed here earlier in the week, there was a way for Villanova to beat North Carolina. They had to do it on the perimeter, where they were supposedly strong and the Tar Heels were supposedly weak. They had to do it by exploiting Carolina's suspect three-point shooting defense and driving against the Heels' weak help-side interior defense.

This was all feasible. Anybody who's watched Carolina play for the past couple of years has seen the Heels go through scoring droughts and fritter away leads while they ignored defense entirely for large chunks of the game.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Ford Field. It looks as if North Carolina doesn't do that anymore. In fact, with a healthy Ty Lawson and an improved 40-minute focus, it looks as if North Carolina might not have any flaws in its game at all.

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Here's a question to nibble on between games: Where would Michigan State have finished in the Big East?

Remember the Big East? The monster conference of all-time? The beast? The 16-team behemoth that grabbed three of the four No. 1 seeds in this tournament? That just 10 days ago had a chance to have four teams in the Final Four?

Well, the champions of the Big Ten have just taken out two of those No. 1 Big East seeds en route to the NCAA title game, in which they will play the winner of tonight's Villanova-North Carolina game Monday night. They've done it with grit and toughness and hard-core rebounding -- qualities we normally associate with the Big East but of which Michigan State has brought truckloads to this tournament.

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DETROIT -- In an earlier journalistic life, Friday would've been a really big day for me. The reason: the government, each first Friday of the month, issued its most-important piece of economic news -- the unemployment report -- and I covered economics. The report it issued this Friday was an instant Page 1 story, which is what they called the first thing you saw on this thing I worked at forever called a newspaper. Friday's report revealed the recession we're in pushed the unemployment rate to its highest mark in a quarter century, 8.5 percent.

DETROIT -- If Jim Nantz utters even one mushy word about the innocence of the Final Four, please muzzle him. As it is, the games will be contested inside a bubble of greed, a football dome that wraps 72,000 mostly bad seats around a basketball court positioned at midfield. As it is, the NCAA has joined marketing hands with the International Management Group, a firm that represents college coaches and pro athletes and only invites conflicts of interests. As it is, the idea of "student-athletes " playing in an amateur environment is farcical.