FanHouse UConn

ST. LOUIS (AP) -With one final blowout, UConn grabbed the national title and a piece of basketball history.

Tina Charles had 25 points and grabbed 19 rebounds Tuesday night as UConn routed Louisville 76-54 and captured the Huskies' sixth national championship.

It wasn't just that Connecticut claimed another title. It was how they did it.

For all Jim Calhoun is, Hasheem Thabeet, Connecticut's seemingly two-story tall center, needs just one marvelously apt word to size up what the coach means to this Final Four team.

Take everything you think you know about this Final Four and toss it in the waste bin with the scrap paper that was once your brackets. The brackets that had Pittsburgh meeting Louisville for the national title. The brackets that were oh so certain Michigan State of the overrated Big Ten would, exactly like IKEA furniture, collapse after one week. The brackets that said Wake Forest was underrated and Arizona's bid was a career achievement award.

Forget it all, because like your brackets, this Final Four will be all about what you didn't know.

MEMPHIS – After Roy Williams answered his last question Sunday night at the press conference following his Tar Heels' easy 72-60 win over Oklahoma to advance to next weekend's Final Four, a North Carolina sports information official barked out some trivia for the departing media: the Tar Heels won for the first time all season with forward Tyler Hansbrough, the defending player of the year, and shooting guard Wayne Ellington failing to score in double figures.

What happens when the Sweet 16 is comprised entirely of storied powers? You get 16 teams all feeling the pressure to succeed. Ray Holloman takes an in-depth look at the expectations being heaped upon every team left in the Big Dance.

There is no room here for the little guy.

Were the Sweet 16 a country club, Tiger Woods might have to pull some strings to get a tee-time. Meanwhile Goliath might find himself picking splinters out of his warm-up-clad rear on any one of these rosters.

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You can't blame Jim Calhoun if he's whistling "Route 66" over the next couple of days because he certainly loves to travel west. Both of Calhoun's national championship teams, in 1999 and 2004, came out of the West Region. So Calhoun's probably feeling like a million bucks right now -- or $1.6 million bucks, as we all now know he makes (But he's worth it, just ask him.) -- with Connecticut grabbing the top spot out west.

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Long ago, somewhere around the time you broke your first New Year's resolution in a flurry of Haagen-Dazz and Oreos, dangerous stopped being an adequate word to describe college basketball's pole position.

Yes, the question came from a guy whom Sean Penn might describe as a hippie, commie something or another. Yes, it was asked by a rabble-rousing political activist who, among other quirks, once was arrested for disrupting a gubernatorial inaugural parade. But just because it was presented by the notorious Ken Krayeske doesn't mean it was inappropriate, that millions of Americans weren't curious to hear the answer.

Why, Jim Calhoun, should the University of Connecticut men's basketball coach be the state's highest-paid employee at $1.6 million a year ... when the state has a $2 billion budget deficit?