College basketball started to appeal to the masses on Jan. 20, 1968, the night No. 2 Houston and Elvin Hayes, who scored 39 points, upset No. 1 UCLA and Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who played with a scratched cornea, in the Astrodome, then known as the eighth wonder of the world. The game was broadcast nationally on TVS — remember TVS? — and was witnessed by 52,693 paying patrons. And the folks who controlled college basketball said, “Hmmm.”
By 1971, the Astrodome was the host site for the Final Four, which wasn’t then known as the Final Four, which is a different story for a different day. Twenty-five years later, the officially christened Final Four would be staged in the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, N.J., and that event also served as a departure. It remains the last time a Final Four has been held in a basketball arena.
Counting this year’s convocation at the Georgia Dome, the next four Final Fours are booked for football palaces. But there’s thinking that the NCAA would like to move its showcase event back to a hoops hall sometime soon, and that would be a move welcomed by anyone who cares more about hoops than commerce.
As basketball venues, football stadiums are good for one thing — selling tickets. Attendance for last season’s title game at the Superdome was 70,913. Given that the NCAA charges hundreds of dollars for Final Four tickets, you’re talking hundreds of thousands unbanked if you move to a less capacious site.
Apart from money, there’s no debate. Domes are too big. (The Georgia Dome has the homiest feel of all the behemoth buildings, but it’s about to go away.) The games don’t look great on TV — and if there’s anything in sports that matters as much as money, it’s looking good on TV — and they require binoculars if you happen to be seated in the most distant pew. Basketball and binoculars: Bad mix.
Owing to financial considerations, there’s no way the NCAA will ever eschew domes completely. The Final Four is the biggest money-maker of every year — remember, the NCAA has no part in the BCS and its upcoming football tournament — and it mightn’t be able to pay the light bill in its Indianapolis HQ if it tried to make do with the revenue from 20,000 tickets sold, as opposed to 70,000. Nor would raising Final Four ticket prices 400 percent be seen as savvy marketing.
But once every five or so years in a real arena? Yeah, that could be done. That could be done, and every single basketball fan in these United States would spew “huzzahs” to the point of hyperventilation.
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