Big Venues, Long Games Can Produce Dome Drones

ATLANTA

For years, there was a saying among basketball people: "There is no better day in sports than semifinal Saturday at the Final Four."

Not anymore.

It has now been 11 years since the NCAA basketball committee decreed that the Final Four would always be played in domes. There have been 22 semifinals since, and exactly four (Stanford-Kentucky in 1998; Maryland-Duke in 2001; Georgia Tech-Oklahoma State in 2004 and Connecticut-Duke that same day) would be considered memorable basketball games. The rest have ranged from decent to wretched.

Saturday night in the Georgia Dome was another example of the fall of semifinal Saturday. Both games were highly anticipated, especially because they involved teams that had come into the tournament as either a No. 1 or a No. 2 seed. Georgetown-Ohio State was a choppy, uneven game with the quality of play dictated as much by the referees as by the players. Florida-UCLA was a blowout, just like the Saturday games have been the past two years.

Monday nights in domes have been better. Five of the past 10 national championship games have been at least very good (Duke-Arizona in 2001 and North Carolina-Illinois in 2005) to superb (Arizona-Kentucky in 1997; Connecticut-Duke in 1999 and Syracuse-Kansas in 2003). Most people here believe Florida-Ohio State has a chance to be outstanding.

The question then is why has semifinal Saturday become slumbering Saturday so frequently. Is it that domes are unnatural settings for basketball? That the shooting backgrounds aren't very good? That the crowd is so far from the court that the players not only can't feel the fans' presence, they can barely hear them?

"I think the domes are definitely part of it," said longtime hoops guru Howard Garfinkel, the man who invented summer all- star camps when he started the Five Star camps 40 years ago. "You just don't have the same kind of spark or emotion in there. It's almost as if they're playing the games in a giant garage. It doesn't feel right. The games always feel choppy."

Other changes in recent years also might contribute to the choppiness Garfinkel references. Once, there were three 90-second TV timeouts per half during the NCAA tournament. Now, there are five per half -- each at least three minutes long.

Halftimes are now 20 minutes long, instead of 15. The NCAA went to 20-minute halftimes at CBS's request in 2003, when the war in Iraq began the night before the start of the tournament. CBS asked for the extra time to do war updates during halftimes. The updates, unlike the war, have gone away, but the 20-minute halftimes have remained. Committee members claim they stuck with the 20-minute halftimes because the walk to and from the locker rooms is longer in domes than in regular arenas.

This is one of the great nonsensical arguments of all time. Even in domes where the locker rooms are relatively far from the court, the walk might take an extra 15 seconds.

"It's tough going in there and waiting for 20 minutes," Maryland Coach Gary Williams said. "In some ways, 15 minutes is too long. The players are usually ready to go back out after about 10 minutes, and you don't want to warm up for more than a couple of minutes at that point. That extra five minutes really slows things down."