Any worthwhile Final Four preview should provide an informed forecast of events.

This will be the first Final Four in three long years with fans.

Jim Nantz loves referencing past Final Four locations and he will mention that this is the 40th anniversary of Michael Jordan’s game-winning shot against Georgetown, which also occurred at the Superdome. He may also mention that this is the 35th anniversary of Keith Smart’s game-winning shot against Syracuse, which also occurred at the Superdome. He will definitely mention that this is the 29th anniversary of North Carolina’s 1993 national title, which was also won at the Superdome. There would seem to be no particular reasons to mention the 2003 title won by Syracuse or the 2012 championship captured by Kentucky, both of which also occurred at the Superdome, but you never know.

Bill Raftery will make self-deprecating remarks about his coaching and playing days. In fact he was a good coach and an even better player. He was La Salle’s leading scorer as a sophomore in an era when sophomores were the youngest players on the floor.

Grant Hill may sound unduly self-deprecating in tone with reference to his playing days even though he was a first-team All American in 1994. He will say you don’t need a three here.

The Superdome is about to welcome the Final Four for a sixth time, which means the site is moving up the all-time rankings for most national title games hosted. Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City is still the leader with nine, and at the final horn on Monday night the Superdome will officially be tied with Louisville’s Freedom Hall for second place among structures that still exist. (“Old” Madison Square Garden hosted seven NCAA title games, though these weren’t what we would today call “true” Final Fours. Read more!)

Should one or more of the upcoming three games feature ugly three-point shooting, there’s a fair chance the shooting background in the notoriously cavernous New Orleans edifice will be cited as a factor. Then again we’ve already seen 64 tournament games played, and none of them took place in a venue that can host an NFL game. Last weekend’s regionals, for example, occurred in NBA arenas occupied by the Warriors, Bulls, Spurs, and Sixers. To this point, the 2022 tournament has played out exclusively in basketball venues.

Which is interesting, because the three-point shooting in the tournament this year has been historically awful.

(Data from the indispensable sports-reference.com. Pay no mind to that automatically generated 2020 label.)

No, don’t blame that new ball that was rolled out for this year’s men’s and women’s tournaments. Shooting on free throws has held up just fine on the men’s side (73.0 percent) compared to last year’s tournament (72.3). It would be an odd ball indeed that poses no problem on free throws but becomes belligerent on threes.

As conference tournaments take over the calendar, a different rite of March entirely is with us once again. All during Champ Week and especially next week when brackets are being completed, you may hear this team praised or that one doubted because it does or does not “rank in the top 25 at KenPom for adjusted efficiency in both offense and defense.”

Being one of the nation’s best teams on both sides of the ball is surely a good thing. All of us would like our team to make this list. Furthermore, teams meeting this specific top-25 definition of performance ambidexterity have indeed won a flock of national titles over the past two decades.

Nevertheless, there’s a curious quality of wheel-reinvention at work here. In fact, the first sentence on the warning label for this evaluative rule is that it’s 0-for-1 over the past 12 months. The dual-top-25 thing ruled out Baylor as a potential national champion last year.

On May 13, 2019, John Beilein announced that he was leaving Michigan to become head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Beilein’s exit came almost a full month after that year’s college coaching carousel had closed for business.

Nate Oats (March 27), Kyle Smith (also March 27), Mark Fox (March 29), Fred Hoiberg (March 30), Buzz Williams (April 3), Jerry Stackhouse (April 5), Eric Musselman (April 7), Mike Young (also April 7), Mick Cronin (April 9), and Mike Anderson (April 19), had all accepted new positions. Eight of those 10 guys were either current Division I head coaches or, in Fox’s case, on garden leave from being one. Hoiberg was a former Iowa State head coach who subsequently served an ill fated stint at the helm of the Chicago Bulls.

Conversely, Stackhouse’s head coaching experience consisted of two seasons in the NBA G League. Today if you enter “Vanderbilt hires Jerry Stackhouse” into a Google News search for calendar year 2019, the first result on the page is a headline from The Tennesseean: “Vanderbilt makes untraditional hire in Jerry Stackhouse and there are plenty of questions.”

On May 22 of that year, Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel elected to follow the Commodores’ untraditional path. Manuel’s selection of Miami Heat assistant coach Juwan Howard was somewhat less surprising than Vanderbilt’s choice in the sense that Howard was and is a Michigan basketball legend. It was perhaps slightly more aberrant than Vanderbilt’s path, however, in light of the fact that Howard had not yet served as a head coach in the G League or anywhere else.

Counting NCAA tournament wins in this century is little more than a blinkered exercise in setting arbitrary and subjective quantitative goalposts. Much like a good portion of real life. Right, let’s do this.

                     NCAA tournament      National titles
                      wins, 2000-21           2000-21
1.   Kansas                51                    1
2.   North Carolina        50                    3
3.   Duke                  49                    3
4.   Michigan State        46                    1
5.   Kentucky              45                    1

After Kentucky there’s a big drop — equivalent to one national championship run — before you get down to a plucky underdog with two national titles like Florida. No other program has won more than 36 games. (Full team list at the bottom of this post. Limber up your scrolling finger.)