NCAA Basketball Detroit

The NCAA is set to announce the host cities for the 2012 through 2016 Final Fours. Ten cities have put in bids for the event ... meaning half will go home disappointed.

Ranking the field:

1-Indianapolis: This is NCAA headquarters and they love having the Final Four here. Since the 2010 Final Four will be held in Indy, expect the new Lucas Oil Field to get the 2015 or 2016 event.

2-New Orleans: The NCAA loves N'Awlins (four previous trips) and it will have been at least a decade since the last one at the Superdome (2003). The dome seems to be in fine shape and they are also trying to land a Super Bowl in the (somewhat) near future. I think the NCAA gets this done in 2013 or 2014.

3-Phoenix: I think that Phoenix/Glendale is the next great stop for sporting events. The Super Bowl was a huge success a the new stadium and I think the Final Four would love to grab some of that. I see the 2012 or 2013 Final Four getting awarded here.

4-San Antonio: San Antonio has become a bit of a great place to have a Final Four. They have had three of them from 1998 to 2008. I think the love affair could continue with the 2016 event. However, one strike against the Alamodome could be that they have been there quite a bit of late.

5-North Texas: The new digs and the potentially amazing capacity makes this very, very attractive. Imagine over 100,000 watching the NCAA Championship game! It could happen. The strike against it could be the fact that this means over-Texas-ing this event (San Antonio in '08, Houston in '11 and now Dallas?). If Dallas pulls this off, it could steal San Antonio's bid down the road.

We're just a few hours away from today's big Oregon-Florida game, and ESPN.com's Pat Forde has a good column about how Oregon got to the Elite Eight, including recruiting players from the Detroit Public Schools. But I imagine every teacher in Detroit who read the column cringed at this comment from one of those players, Tajuan Porter:

"I didn't even know Oregon was a state."

That's not a ringing endorsement for Porter's geography skills, but it's fascinating to see how the Ducks turned into a college basketball power by recruiting Detroit high school star Malik Hairston, and then landing his high school teammate Porter two years later. Forde's column shows how if the Ducks advance to the Final Four today, they'll have recruiting in the Motor City to thank.

I was about as big a Fab Five fan as you can possibly be. When Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson were leading Michigan to back-to-back Final Fours, I was a high school student just 20 minutes down the road from Ann Arbor. I loved those guys.

But I'm not so sure that, all things considered, the trouble Webber caused Michigan was worth his talent on the court. Michigan's basketball program is still reeling from the NCAA sanctions that resulted from Webber taking improper benefits, and those Final Four banners have long since been put in storage. So I find it a little galling that 15 years later, he says, "You can't think of Michigan without thinking of us."

Still, the article in which that quote appears is a fun way to reminisce about those days. Although the other four members of the Fab Five haven't been scrubbed from Michigan's official history the way Webber has, they all seem to feel loyalty to Webber and feel slighted by the way the Fab Five's legacy now seems tarnished. They seem to blame Michigan for that. They ought to blame Webber.