Bryan Burwell

SAN ANTONIO - Anywhere they gather, you hear the conversations. At the baggage claim carousel, or the hotel lobby. You can hear them riding down elevators or gabbing over beer and hor d’oeuvres at some cocktail reception. It’s a familiar scene during every Final Four weekend, as fanatic hoop pilgrims steam into town loaded with theories and hunches about how college basketball’s championship weekend will play out.

Usually, the conjecture is rather universal and fairly uncomplicated. Yet on Thursday afternoon all along the gridlocked path to the Alamodome, if you eavesdropped on conversations as coaches darted in and out of the snarled downtown traffic, the only consensus was confusion.

“This one’s so loaded with talent,” said East Carolina athletic director Terry Holland, the former ACC coach of the year at Virginia. “As a Davidson grad, I obviously would have loved it if they were here, but four No. 1 seeds in a Final Four? That’s pretty special.”

Just across the highway from the dome, a giant three-story NCAA bracket banner draped down the side of a nearby building. East and West, Midwest and South, everything came together quite symmetrically. Number One seeds all the way across have miraculously found their way to the Alamodome, giving the Final Four an historic and star-studded feel.

Memphis, North Carolina, Kansas and UCLA have arrived here looking exactly like you’d expect high-profile super powers to look. Their rosters are filled with former McDonald’s prep All-Americas (12) and current Associated Press All-Americas (10). They have the national player of the year (North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough) and two of the three best freshmen in the land (UCLA’s Kevin Love and Memphis’ Derrick Rose), and there are future NBA draft picks two, three and four deep on every roster.

“Now I thought when I was here in 2001 that was a pretty good year,” said Michigan State coach Tom Izzo. “We had Michigan State, Maryland, Duke and Arizona. That was three No. 1 seeds and a No. 3, and that was really good. But this one just might be the best I’ve seen, particularly when you put the head coaches in there. Everyone in this Final Four is a somebody.”

Lots of somebodys. Roy Williams, Ben Howland, John Calipari and Bill Self are responsible for one national title, 12 Final Four appearances, 1,612 coaching victories, 21 Elite Eights, 29 Sweet 16s and seven national coach-of-the-year honors. With this much talent on the floor and bench, trying to pick the eventual winner is tricky business.

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And the result of all this star power is a Final Four that is so wildly unpredictable that no one can say with any level of certainty who will win it. I know I have UCLA in my brackets, and I’m sticking with the Bruins because of that. But don’t tell me that North Carolina, with its 15-game winning streak, doesn’t look good. Don’t tell me that Memphis, which has lost all of one game and blew out Michigan State and Texas by 18 points, doesn’t suddenly look frighteningly dangerous. And even though Kansas barely survived its little dance with underdog Davidson, it was crushing teams by an average of 19 points until then.

In my annual informal “coach on the street” poll, I must have talked to a dozen coaches, and the best I could come up with as a consensus was that no one genuinely knows who’s going to win.

“If you took these four teams and played out the Final Four seven different times over the next week, you’d probably get seven different results,” said Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan.

Izzo like the idea of playing it out like a math experiment. “Whoa boy. How many times do you want to run it?” he wondered. “Realistically, if they played 10 different times, I believe everyone would win at least once, and I guess somebody would have to win at least twice, but for the life of me, I don’t know who it would be.”

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