PHOENIX โ Just as the Final Four committee held a formal tip-off event Wednesday, a few more basketball planets appeared to be lining up for the Arizona Wildcats.
Five days before Gov. Doug Ducey and various other officials formally introduced 2017 Final Four events at Phoenix Convention Center, the home-state Wildcats finally received the services of their top returning scorer, when Allonzo Trierโs 19-game suspension over a positive PED test ended.
Just four days before Wednesdayโs news conference was the day when the Wildcats marched into Pauley Pavilion for their biggest win of the season, a nine-point victory over a potential No. 1 seed in UCLA.
And it was just the night before Wednesday when three more potential No. 1 seeds โ Villanova, Kansas and Kentucky โ all lost games.
โThose kinds of things are expected, but maybe not three in one night,โ said Michigan State athletic director Mark Hollis, chair of this seasonโs NCAA Tournament selection committee.
So whoโs to say Arizona, now fortified with Trier and three already well-seasoned freshman talents, canโt make that I-10 shuttle up to the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale for the final weekend of the season?
The Wildcats may have as good a chance as anybody at this point.
Certainly, thatโs the impression Fat Lever has. The Pueblo High School legend, who went on to star at Arizona State and in the NBA, said after participating in the Final Four event Wednesday that he watches a lot of college basketball these days and believes the Wildcats have Final Four ability.
Getting there, of course, is another thing.
The UA still has 11 more regular-season games, starting Thursday against Washington State, even before the Pac-12 Tournament starts. Then there are the matchups and madness of the postseason to follow.
โWhen the Pac-12 tournament starts, thatโs gonna be the indicator,โ Lever said. โYou hope that when that tournament comes around theyโre playing good basketball. If they can get here, it all comes down to brackets.โ
Even though Lever played for ASU, he says the word โhopeโ about the UA in apparent sincerity.
Lever not only has hometown roots in Tucson but says heโll even root for UA over ASU when the Wildcats have somebody heโs close to playing for them โ such as Nick Johnson, who once trained with Lever as a Phoenix-area youth. He says he pulls for all Pac-12 teams, too.
Leverโs not the only one with Sun Devil blood pulling for the Wildcats. The executive director of the Phoenix Local Organizing Committee herself, former ASU administrator Dawn Rogers, once hired UA coach Sean Miller to be the head coach at Xavier.
She reacted the way Arizona Wildcats fans might have when the Trier news spread last weekend.
โI went to work out and I saw the ticker on the screen that said โTrier returning,โ and I was so excited for them,โ Rogers said. โI was really impressed with the maturity and poise of his team even before they had Trier back.โ
But even with Trier, Rogers said, teams โreally need a lot of things to fall in placeโ to make the difficult journey to a Final Four, and history suggests the odds are not in the Wildcatsโ favor.
Only a handful of teams in the modern Final Four era (since 1979) have reached the event from within a half-dayโs drive. No home-state team has ever won it in that era, though Kansas was just 40 miles from home across the Missouri-Kansas border when it won the 1988 title at Kemper Arena.
However, Butlerโs appearance at the Indianapolis Final Four in 2010 and Michigan Stateโs participation in the 2015 event at Detroit added a notably different flavor. Hollis said Michigan State had up to 30,000 fans among the 65,000 watching the Detroit Final Four.
โAll four teams that make it here are gonna have earned their way here and each one of them will have a special story,โ Hollis said. โUltimately as a committee, all we care about is that the four best and most deserving teams advance their way to the Final Four.
โHowever, when a local team does make the Final Four, it brings an extra level of excitement. โฆ If Arizona or UCLA or Gonzaga or Oregon were to advance here, it would bring an extra level of excitement, I would think.โ
None of those teams would surprise if they made it to Glendale for what will be the Westโs first Final Four since 1995, when the event was held at the Seattle Kingdome.
The Kingdome was demolished in 2000, leaving the West without a covered structure that met the 60,000-seat minimum until Glendaleโs University of Phoenix Stadium was built in 2006.
โI think West Coast basketball is great every year,โ said Dan Gavitt, the NCAAโs senior vice president of basketball. โBut it is neat that youโve got so many Final Four contenders in the region this year and I think itโs something that the committee envisioned and hoped for when they awarded Phoenix. This is a way to celebrate basketball in this region, and this area.โ
