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Message: [QUOTE="KY Card Fan, post: 3953836, member: 9787"] Yeah, in my earlier reply I was going to point out that it would not be inaccurate to substitute "Auriemma" for "Wooden" in the "Wooden played almost all of his non-Final Four games close to home" statement, especially in the last 10 years or so. One big difference, though. Back in the Wooden era teams were assigned to regions based almost totally on geography. So UCLA benefitted from the fact that (with the exception of a one-off like Texas Western in 1966 or Houston in the Elvin Hayes years) there was not much competition west of the Mississippi River with the exception of Kansas, and Kansas would always end up in the Midwest Region, just as teams like Kentucky and Indiana were always in the Mideast and North Carolina was always in the East. During my college years Dayton was one of the strongest independents (anyone remember Don May?) and a couple times they were shipped to the West in an attempt to achieve some sort of competitive balance. [/QUOTE]