Security concerns, both known and unknown, were ultimately why the SEC chose to restrict fan access to the semifinals and championship game of the men's basketball tournament held over the weekend in Atlanta.

One quarterfinal, Saturday's semifinals and Sunday's championship game between Georgia and Arkansas were played in front of thousands of empty seats at Alexander Memorial Coliseum, which became the venue after a tornado slammed into the Georgia Dome Friday night.

Georgia's game against Kentucky drew 1,458, while the crowd for Saturday's semifinals was listed at 2,517. The championship game on Sunday was played before 3,700. The capacity at Alexander Memorial Coliseum is just over 9,000.

Irate fans outside the Coliseum wanted to know why they were on the outside looking in while there were plenty of empty seats inside.

To understand the SEC's decision, you have to go back to the early hours of Saturday morning when league officials and athletics directors were meeting at the Georgia Dome.

"These decisions are basically being made at about 2 a.m.," said Mark Womack, the senior associate commissioner of the SEC. "At that point we have no idea what shape the city is in or what to expect the next day. There may be no law enforcement to help us with traffic and other issues because of the damage downtown. And there was the possibility that more bad weather would be coming through."

The SEC had sold more than 20,000 tickets to each of the remaining games and would be moving to a building that was half that size. Womack, who was in charge in Atlanta because SEC commissioner Mike Slive was in Indianapolis serving on the NCAA selection committee, met with the five athletics directors whose teams were going to be affected by the change. Slive stayed in the loop by phone. Also in the meeting was associate commissioner Charles Bloom, the head of communications for the SEC.

"All of the athletics directors were in agreement that in no way could this become a general admission process where people could come on a first-come, first-serve basis," said Larry Templeton, the athletics director from Mississippi State. "We felt that Georgia Tech had stepped up and helped us solve a major problem by giving us a place to play the games. It wouldn't have been fair to put a crowd control problem on top of that."

So the five athletics directors whose teams were still involved in the tournament — Templeton, Damon Evans of Georgia, Mitch Barnhart of Kentucky, Jeff Long of Arkansas and Mike Hamilton of Tennessee — agreed that Saturday's semifinals and Sunday championship game would be limited to an equal number of tickets for each school. The number they arrived on for Saturday's games was 400 per school.

"Basically that was the number each school thought they needed to take care of family members of the players and members of their official traveling party," Womack said. "Those tickets were given to each school and it was up to the school to distribute them the way they saw fit."

"Once you got past that number, with five schools involved, it was not going to be manageable," Templeton said.

"This was one of those cases where you have to think about what's best for the conference and not what's necessarily best for one of the schools," Kentucky's Barnhart said. "The priorities were to get the games played in the safest possible manner. There was no easy decision here."

The SEC announced Monday that it was continuing to work on a refund policy for those fans who have tickets to the tournament that they were not able to use. That policy will be announced on www.secsports.com, or on the Web sites of each institution.