First Round

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP)- Sean Ogirri threw down a slam, then ran by the Wichita State fans with his arms extended as if to announce, "Here I am." He might as well have been talking for the Missouri Valley Conference.

Ogirri had 23 points and hit six 3-pointers to lead Wichita State past Seton Hall from the vaunted Big East, 86-66, Thursday in the first round of the Washington Regional, giving the mid-major conference an impressive debut after hearing plenty of criticism about its haul of four NCAA tournament bids.

"We're really proud of what we've done, and we weren't going to let a bunch of people around the country who haven't seen us make us feel any different," Wichita State coach Mark Turgeon said of the conference.

"We know what we have and it's pretty special."

Paul Miller scored 15 points for the seventh-seeded Shockers (25-8), who advanced

to face Tennessee in Saturday's second round.

It was Wichita State's first NCAA win since reaching a regional final in 1981 and its first tournament game since a 83-62 first-round loss to DePaul in 1988.

The win also provided the MVC a quick bit of vindication after the league raised eyebrows with four bids, the same as the Atlantic Coast, Big 12 and Pac-10 conferences.

The criticism included CBS analyst Billy Packer grilling selection committee chairman Craig Littlepage over the selections, which clearly bothered Turgeon.

The coach insisted his team- which won the regular-season title but lost in the league tournament- belonged in the NCAA tournament. He said the Shockers were eager to play a Big East school. He was proven right on both counts.

Wichita State led just about the entire way, getting a strong first half from Ogirri and Miller to build a 20-point lead late in the half and lead by 16 at the break. Tenth-seeded Seton Hall (18-12) never got closer than 11 in the second half.

The Pirates were the lowest seeded team among a record eight NCAA bids for the Big East. And even though they were the lower seed in this matchup, their players sure talked like a favorite from the bigger conference, with Donald Copeland making that mind-set clear by promising Wednesday that the Pirates wouldn't underestimate the Shockers.

Second Round

Associated Press

GREENSBORO, N.C.- RJ. Couisnard stepped back from the defender and launched a straightaway 3-pointer with the shot clock winding down. As soon as the ball swished through the net, Couisnard pointed triumphantly to Wichita State's rowdy fans.

The message was clear. The team from that pesky midmajor conference was on its way to the NCAA's Round of 16 for the first time in 25 years (video).

Karon Bradley hit a go-ahead jumper with about two minutes left while Couisnard followed with that big 3 to help Wichita State beat second-seeded Tennessee 80-73 Saturday in the Washington regional, giving the Missouri Valley Conference's regular-season champions a second straight win over an opponent from a power conference.

Now the seventh-seeded Shockers (26-8) are experiencing all the March magic they could only imagine while languishing through an 18-year NCAA drought

"This is one of those moments I'm never going to forget," said Paul Miller, who had 10 points and 8 rebounds. "It's just something that you never understand until you're actually there. You see it on TV and you see teams going to the Sweet Sixteen and winning big games in the NCAA Tournament, and to be a part of it means a lot

"It's just been an amazing weekend. This is my all-time favorite moment, right here."

Wichita State opened the Tournament with an 86-66 win over Seton Hall, silencing those who wondered why the MVC got four tourney bids. But beating the Volunteers (22-8), the Southeastern Conference's East division champion, means so much more.

Couisnard finished with 20 points on 6-for-7 shooting for Wichita State, which used a late 7-0 spurt to break a 65-65 tie and advance to face the winner of today's George Mason-North Carolina game.

When the horn finally sounded, coach Mark Turgeon pumped his right fist in the air while fans began chanting "MVC!" and "Sweet Sixteen!"

"I kept saying we weren't any good when practice started, and now we're part of the Sweet Sixteen," Turgeon said. "We just keep getting a little bit better."

The Volunteers ended their first season under coach Bruce Pearl on a disappointing note after exceeding expectations all year behind an up tempo attack and pressure defense. Still, it was a significant step forward for a program that had gone 61-59 in four seasons since last making the NCAA's in 2001.

"We'll be back," Pearl said. "I'm very, very proud of these young men."

Tennessee led 63-58 on a pair of free throws from Watson with 5:42 left, but the Shockers rallied to tie it at 63-63 on a 3-pointer from Ogirri.

After the teams traded baskets, Bradley drained a jumper from just outside the lane for a 67-65 lead with 2:12 left. Couisnard followed with the stepback 3 over Dane Bradshaw for a 70-65 lead with 1:05 left 

Regional Semifinal

WASHINGTON (AP)- Lamar Butler dribbled out the final seconds of George Mason's latest improbable win, then dropped the ball and wagged eight fingers toward a TV camera. As in, "Round of eight, here we come!"

Butler hopped and skipped to the locker room, yelling over and over: "We're not even supposed to be here!"

Playing a short drive from George Mason's campus, Folarin Campbell scored 16 points and the 11th-seeded Patriots used a shutdown defense to beat seventh-seeded Wichita State 63-55 Friday night in a mid-major matchup, moving within one victory of the Final Four.

"We've been trying to prove ourselves all year. We heard what the critics were saying- that we didn't belong in the tournament," senior guard Tony Skinn said.

"The confidence level has risen, and we've gotten a chance to show the country what we're capable of."

Plenty, such as denying the ball to Missouri Valley Conference player of the year Paul Miller, who led the Shockers with 16 points and nine rebounds, and Wichita State's second-leading scorer, Sean Ogirri, who had all of four points on 1-for-8 shooting.

Wichita State finished 20-for-64 on field-goal attempts, including a startling 3-for-24 on 3-pointers.

The tone was set early, as George Mason broke out to a 9-0 lead and took a 35-19 edge into halftime, thanks in large part to Wichita State's 9-for-30 shooting from the field to that point, 1-for-11 on 3s.

"As hard as I tried," Shockers coach Mark Turgeon said, "I couldn't get them out of that funk."

How unexpected was George Mason's giddy, bracket-disrupting run through the NCAA Tournament? The Patriots didn't receive a single vote in this season's final AP Top 25 and never had won a single game at the NCAA Tournament until last week. But they stunned sixth-seeded Michigan State and No. 3- seeded North Carolina, the defending national champion.

George Mason's defense was superb in those games, too, as was Campbell, a 6-foot-4 sophomore who, like the rest of the Patriots' starting five, hails from nearby Maryland. He averaged only 10.7 points this season, but that's up to 17.4 in the tournament.

How fitting: An unheralded player lifting an unheralded team.

"Every time we go out there," Butler said, "we feel we have something to prove."

Butler and Skinn added 14 points apiece for the Patriots (26-7), who will meet top-seeded Connecticut or fifth-seeded Washington in Sunday's Washington Regional final. Those teams played in Friday night's second game.

Whoever George Mason's next opponent is will have to figure out a way to dent the Patriots' tough D. They tied for eighth in Division I this season by holding opponents under 39 percent shooting and shut down Michigan State and North Carolina for long stretches.

"They're very well-coached. They've caused a lot of problems for a lot of teams," said Wichita State's Kyle Wilson, who scored 12 points and helped his team make the final score respectable.

But Wichita State (26-9) just couldn't put the ball in the bucket often enough to make a real game of it.

George Mason led by as many as 19 in the second half, and Wichita State's offense never got going consistently.

One sequence, with about 2� minutes left, captured the Shockers' rough night: They got three straight offensive rebounds, but the first two put backs were strongly contested and didn't fall, and on the third, P.J. Couisnard simply missed an open layup.

Wichita State started hitting some shots late, getting as close as 62-55 on Wilson's 3-pointer with 23 seconds left. But that was it, and George Mason "held on despite shaky foul shooting, then jumped on each other, shouted and pointed to their vocal cheering section.

National Championship Game

Sports Illustrated

April 10, 2006

Grant Wahl

Joakim Noah never stopped hopping. Not after he'd blocked six shots, setting NCAA tournament and championship-game records. Not after he'd devoured the rim, to say nothing of UCLA, with a procession of ferocious dunks. And not even after the effervescent Florida center had joined his Gators teammates on the victory stand at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis on Monday night. As Noah jumped up and down-a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times-he took his rightful place as the Most Outstanding Player of the 2006 Final Four and perhaps the long-sought solution to America's energy crisis. "This is better than sex!" Noah exclaimed, then clarified in case anyone forgot that he's half-French. "And trust me, I'm doing it right." The Gators, 73-57 victors over the Bruins, had more than a few reasons to go orgasmic on everyone. Maybe it was the three straight three-pointers to start the second half, two of them by guard Lee Humphrey, which blew open the game and staked Florida to an 18-point lead. Or maybe it was the lockdown defense that forced the cowed Bruins into 36.1% shooting. Or maybe it was just the Gators' remarkable journey from being unranked in the preseason to the pinnacle of college basketball.

In the end, though, it all came back to Noah, who lorded over the title game with 16 points, nine rebounds and those six blocks. Early in the first half he set the tone by rejecting the Bruins' 7-foot center, Ryan Hollins, and then luring guard Arron Afflalo into a traveling violation and some serious smack talk. "I knew I was getting into his head," Noah would say later. "When he traveled, I told him he was scared. He said he was going to f-- me up. Well, guess who won?" Frustrated all evening, Afflalo ended up shooting just 3 for 10. And Noah was so confident that he began winking and blowing kisses at the UCLA cheerleaders ... with nine minutes left in the game.

"He's really long, and he doesn't go for shot fakes," UCLA guard Jordan Farmar said of the Bruins' tormentor after the game. "A lot of bigs leave their feet because they want to block shots. He just uses his length to his advantage. And he changed about 10 more shots than he blocked."

Has any college player ever improved more between his freshman and sophomore years than Noah? "He just went out there and worked every single day," Florida coach Billy Donovan said on Monday night. "You could see him getting better and better and better."

In winning his first national championship, the 40-year-old Donovan finally shed the nickname Billy the Kid, showing just how much he had changed in the six years since he led the Gators to the title game in the same building (where they fell to Michigan State). Part of his evolution has been personal. Once a notorious workaholic, Donovan now takes a couple of hours every night, even during the season, to chill out at home in Gainesville with his wife, Christine, and their two sons (Billy, 14, and Bryan, 9), two daughters (Hasbrouck, 12, and Connor, 4) and three dogs, including a black Labrador retriever named Alli Gator. He goes to his sons' basketball games, finds time to attend some of Hasbrouck's horse shows and brings his dad, Bill, a former player at Boston College, on the team plane to road games.

Billy was also there for his family after Christine had a miscarriage on the eve of the 2000-01 season, staying home from work for a week. "Billy was a huge support system," she says. "Every time I'd had a kid, he hadn't stayed home for more than an hour."

In some ways, of course, Donovan is still the same old Billy D (minus the slicked-back Eddie Munster coif). "I would say my personal habits have always been a little bit bizarre," he says with a chuckle. A fitness fanatic, he's just as likely to go on a four-mile run at midnight as at 5 a.m., and he often sleeps as little as two hours a night. After Donovan threw out his back jumping to his feet during a win at Kentucky last month, he ignored his trainer's commands to take it easy. Says Christine, shaking her head, "I had to put his shoes on for him every morning, and he's still going and working out!"

Yet it's Donovan's approach to recruiting that has undergone the most striking transformation. In 2000 his team was a reflection of its era, a hoops version of the brash late-'90s Internet start-ups: The Gators defied tradition, hoarded top talent from across the nation and achieved near-instant success-mostly at the expense of a suspicious (some would say jealous) Establishment. But during 2000, in Gainesville as in Silicon Valley, the bubble burst. The Gators were stung by early departures for the NBA by Mike Miller, Donnell Harvey and Kwame Brown, who stayed a combined three seasons at Florida. (Brown, the No. 1 pick of the 2001 draft, committed to the Gators but never even made it to campus.) In each of the five years following the 2000 title-game run, Florida lost to lower-seeded teams during the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.

"The perception surrounding our program was that we had these high-powered, overly talented basketball teams, and I didn't think I'd done a very good job of recruiting," Donovan explained during a quiet moment in his Indianapolis hotel room last week. "Guys were only staying one or two years, and I don't think I was prepared for that. The trick in college coaching now is being able to get those next-tier guys who are ranked in the top 25 to 100 of their class, who love the game, are highly competitive and have a good work ethic. As a coach you don't want to just win the battles in July [during the recruiting season]. You want to win the battles in March."

While Donovan's 2000 team featured four McDonald's High School All-Americans, his 2006 champions had only one, sophomore swingman Corey Brewer, and yet his four-man 2004 recruiting class will now go down as the most storied in Florida basketball history. After Donovan lost his top three players from last season- David Lee, Anthony Roberson and Matt Walsh-the onus fell on the Oh-Fours: Brewer, point guard Taurean Green and big men Noah and Al Horford. Roommates since their first day on campus, they developed a chemistry that's remarkable in today's college game. "I remember meeting these guys, and the first thing they said was, Let's go to the gym," recalls Horford. "I was like, Damn, they're already thinking about playing. When you hear that, you know you're with guys who want to win."

Their effect on their coach has been startling: Donovan now sounds like an Internet-bust survivor who figured things out in the new economy, and the Gators look like the Google guys of college basketball. "The more I do this, the more I believe if you're building a successful company or program, so much of it comes down to the makeup of the people, from your coaches to your players," says Donovan. "What sets these kids apart isn't their talent. They all complement each other so well."

The Oh-Fours all have their roles within the group. Brewer, a high-flying 6'8" matchup from hell, exudes a laid-back cool beneath his headband. Green, the son of former NBA player Sidney Green, yaps back and forth with the voluble Noah and wears a point guard's chip on his shoulder. Meanwhile, Horford, the 6'9" son of former NBAer Tito Horford, brings a sage, almost regal, unifying force to the quartet. "I feel like I'm probably the father figure," says Horford, who Donovan says is one of the smartest players he has ever coached. "We run a lot of stuff on offense," the coach says, "and Al could probably tell you what all five guys should be doing."

Yet the supernova of the entire tournament was Noah, who went from playing only two minutes total in last year's NCAAs to assuming a dominant role this season, averaging 14.2 points, 7.1 rebounds and 2.4 blocks. Ranked only No. 68 in his high school recruiting class, the 6'11", 227-pound Noah rose to potential NBA-lottery status in the past month by showing off a nonstop motor and a forcefulness around the basket that belied his nickname, Stickman (hung on him by Tyrone Green, his former summer-league coach in New York City, on account of his once-frail frame). So, Joakim was asked last week, is it time to abandon your handle now that you're filling out? "Nah, I'm always going to be Sticks, even if I get buff," said Noah, who likes to adorn his autographs with a stick figure.

The ponytailed Noah was also the MVP of the interview room last week, whether he was speaking in French to a reporter for L'Equipe, recounting his vomit-inducing workouts last summer "when I could have stayed in bed all cozy with my girlfriend" or laughing about the picture of him, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, wearing a sort of giant full-length blue muumuu on campus. Cecilia Rodhe, Noah's Swedish-born mother, likes to call her son an "African Viking," owing to his exotic bloodlines. His globe-trotting French-Cameroonian father, Yannick Noah, the tennis Hall of Famer, is now a pop star in Europe. And although Noah's parents divorced in 1989, his family contingent in Indy-his sister, Yelena; his paternal grandmother, Marie-Claire; Yannick; and Cecilia-watched together from the stands last week. They all had their own special memories of Joakim's meteoric rise to hoops stardom. When Joakim hugged his mother (a former Miss Universe finalist) after winning the Most Outstanding Player award at the Minneapolis Regional, she teared up thinking back to the days in New York City's Hell's Kitchen when her son was in the seventh grade and she walked with him in the cold to enroll him in a Police Athletic League basketball program.

Yannick, for his part, had sat angst-ridden in a Paris TV studio at 4 a.m. and watched the live broadcast as Florida clinched its Final Four berth. Last week in Indianapolis he thought back to the trip he and his father, Zacharie, had made to see the Gators play two home games in March. "It was good to be the three Noah boys again," said Yannick, whose dad hadn't seen his grandson since Joakim's visit to Cameroon last summer. "Our flight was late, so when we arrived, the game had already started. There was a timeout, and my dad let go with a big whistle. Even with 14,000 people there, Jo looked up and raised his fist. That was special."

So too, naturally, were the scenes in Indy. In their 73-58 semifinal win over George Mason, the Gators abruptly ended the greatest Cinderella story in NCAA tournament history without a shred of remorse. So skilled were Noah and Horford that they put the lie to the adage that guards rule the NCAA tournament. "In March you need playmakers and decision makers, and most of the time those guys are your guards," says Donovan. "It's a little bit different for us because the decision makers in a lot of what we do are Horford and Noah. A lot of our offense runs through those guys." Time and again last Saturday, Horford and Noah pulled down rebounds, only to forgo outlet passes and dribble to the front of the Gators' fast break.

While Florida fans were partying in the lobby of the Omni Severin hotel in downtown Indy just three hours after the win over George Mason, Donovan and his staff gathered one floor below in a windowless basement bunker to cram for UCLA. Assistant coach Donnie Jones edited clips of UCLA's offensive and defensive sets as the rest of the staff watched tape of the Bruins' tournament games. Standing before a massive dry-erase board, Donovan began drawing plays from the Bruins' screen-and stagger-heavy offensive sets, focusing on how to defend Farmar on pick-and-rolls. "You can have two guys go out and play Farmar, but that will leave one of their bigs wide open, and that's exactly what they want," Donovan said. "You want to make [Farmar] turn the corner and take it to our bigs and throw it out. Don't run two guys at the ball."

Florida's strategy worked to a tee against the Bruins. Farmar's high pick-and-rolls were harmless, and to stymie UCLA's three-point threat, Donovan sicced the 6'8" Brewer on Afflalo, who finished with only 10 points. Green went 1 for 9 from the floor, but he provided a dangerous spark all night. "Taurean was the one who ignited everything because he forced them to put two guys on him," Donovan said, "and we threw the ball back to Jo, who was really able to put the ball down and create."

Even though Yannick's 1983 French Open championship took place two years before he was born, Joakim has seen the tape of his father's victory more than a dozen times. Whenever he watches, he'll replay the triumphant scene in which his grandfather Zacharie leaps out of the stands onto the Roland Garros clay and embraces Yannick before an adoring French crowd. "Every time I watch, it gives me shivers," Joakim said last week. "It's pure, raw emotion. There's nothing fake about it."

Twenty-three years later, another touching championship moment between Noahs took place in the RCA Dome. In the delirium after the final horn, as a paper rainbow fell from the rafters, Joakim climbed into the Florida cheering section. He hugged his mother first, then his sister, and then his father pulled him close until the two men were cheek to cheek. "Je suis fier de toi," Yannick whispered in his ear. "Merci, merci." ("I am proud of you. Thank you, thank you.")

"Je t'aime," Joakim replied. ("I love you.")

In Europe they have a way to hail transcendent performances, whether they take place in an opera house or a sports arena. So bravo, Joakim. Bravo, Oh-Fours. And bravo, Gators. You are the 2006 national champions, and there's nothing fake about that.