Storylines Enhance Final Four

For CBS, this is a dream Final Four.

It has everything. Florida, trying to become the first team since 1992 to defend a national title. UCLA, which has won more championships (11) than any school in history. As an added bonus, they will play one another Saturday in a rematch of last year's final.

The other game has two programs trying to recapture past glory. Ohio State hasn't won the national title since 1960, when one of its benchwarmers was a bright-eyed sophomore named Bob Knight. The Buckeyes went back to the Final Four the next two years and went again in 1968. Since then, they have been to exactly one (1999), so this is, to put it mildly, a very big deal.

It may be a bigger deal at Georgetown, if only because of the depths the program had fallen to as recently as three years ago. Once, Georgetown was one of the programs in the country -- playing in the national championship game three times in four years between 1982 and 1985 -- winning the championship in 1984. The coach then was John Thompson, a fierce, hyper-competitive man whose style of coaching and play was embodied by his best player, Patrick Ewing -- like his coach, 6-foot-10 and equally fierce; equally competitive and wonderfully gifted.

After Ewing graduated in 1985, the Hoyas had spasms of success: there were appearances in three regional finals -- the last in 1996 -- but it was clear to those watching closely that something went out of Thompson after the 1988 Olympics. He coached that U.S. team, the last U.S. team to not use NBA players, and lost in the semifinals to the Soviet Union. Instead of climaxing a Hall of Fame career with a gold medal, Thompson came back with a bronze medal and never seemed to have the same fire as a coach or a recruiter.

He walked away from the job very suddenly, with his team sitting 0-4 in the Big East in the winter of 1999 and handed the reins to his long-time lieutenant, Craig Esherick. He left a semi-empty cupboard and by the time Esherick began to refill it five years later by recruiting the three juniors who are the heart of this team -- Jeff Green, Roy Hibbert and Jonathan Wallace -- his job was in serious jeopardy. In 2004, the Hoyas finished 12th in the Big East, meaning they just barely qualified for the conference tournament.

After receiving the kiss of death, "vote of confidence," from Georgetown's President, Esherick was fired (college presidents tend to lie only when their lips are moving). He was replaced by a familiar name -- John Thompson -- only it was Thompson's son, John Thompson III now coaching the team while the father had become a radio talk show host. There were some who cried nepotism at the time, failing to understand that the son had already proven himself during four years as the head coach at Princeton and had learned a lot of basketball, not only from his father, but from Pete Carril, the legendary Princeton coach under whom he had played and coached.

Young John is about as different from Old John in style as a father and son can be. He isn't nearly as big or nearly as loud or nearly as angry. Old John used to storm into rooms, railing at the media, screaming that he would do things his way, all the while demanding to be heard -- as if it was possible not to listen when he was talking. He had opinions on everything and he was so secretive -- chaining the doors closed when his team practiced; working in an office completely unmarked so no one could find him; staying in hotels with his team that not even his athletic director knew about; refusing to tell anyone what any of his players were majoring in -- that the phrase, "Hoya Paranoia," became part of the basketball vernacular.

"I was paranoid," he said recently, laughing. "It was the only way I knew how to do things. I was on a mission and nothing was going to stop me from accomplishing it."

His son is also on a mission but his methods are completely different. He is soft-spoken, careful about what he says and, if he ever gets angry, he doesn't show it in public. Georgetown still has all sorts of rules about when people can and (mostly) cannot speak to its players, but there is far less hostility surrounding the program than when Old John was the coach.

What the father and son clearly have in common is an understanding of how to win at basketball. Georgetown plays differently on the offensive end of the floor -- running Carril's Princeton offense, which often brings the center away from the basket as opposed to the offense of Old John which planted a center (usually a dominant one) near the basket -- but still plays the kind of intense, get-after-it defense that Old John preached.

They also have one other important thing in common with their predecessors: they are fearless. Trailing Vanderbilt by one in the waning seconds last Friday night, Jeff Green demanded the ball and forced up a shot in traffic. There was no way he was giving the ball up. He is the team's best player and he was going to take the shot that won or lost the game.