SAN ANTONIO, Texas - On the eve of the men’s Final Four ...

All the teams will be here and talking later today. We’ll quiz UNC’s Roy Williams hard about his feelings about coaching against Kansas for the first time since he left there five years ago. He’ll get peeved, probably, and say that subject is old news. So it goes. Williams really seems like a good guy to deal with generally and he obviously is on the top rung of coaches. He knows how the game is played.

But before we get into that, I wanted to share a story that ran Thursday in USA Today about the 1985 Memphis team that lost in the Final Four to Villanova. The story details all the tragedy that has befallen the Tigers since that day; some of it self-inflicted, some of it not.

The Tampa connection is Dana Kirk, who coached at the University of Tampa before going to Memphis State (that’s what the school was named then). He was outgoing and generally fun to be around (on a superficial level) but he eventually landed in a lot of hot water there. A year after the trip to the Final Four, he was fired for multiple NCAA violations and later faced 11 counts of tax evasion, filing false income tax returns, mail fraud and obstruction of justice. He spent four months in prison for that.

I covered that Final Four and remembered being struck by how badly Kirk was outcoached in the semifinal loss to Villanova. Not long after that, an executive at Florida State - the Seminoles were in the same conference then as Memphis State - told me that a bad moon was rising at Memphis and it would shine baddest on Kirk. He wasn’t wrong.