Grant had one guest today: Tim Brando of CBS Sports. Brando recapped an NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Game that was full of smothering defense and outrageously poor shooting. Tim also discussed how scholarship reduction and a rise in talent level have evened the playing field for small schools and made historically prestigious jobs less appealing to up-and-coming coaches.

The Huskies did it with defense holding the Bulldogs to a Final Four-record low 18.8 shooting percentage (12 for 64).

Connecticut capped one of college basketball’s best postseason runs, winning six games in the NCAA tournament after winning five games in as many days to win the Big East title.

It was the second straight year Butler lost in the championship game. Last year they were beaten 61-59 by Duke.

Walker didn’t match his 25.0 average in the tournament, but the Huskies didn’t need a lot of points playing defense as they did.

Calhoun, a Hall of Famer who has won the three titles in four Final Four appearances, joins John Wooden (10), Adolph Rupp (7), Mike Krzyzewski (4) and Bob Knight (3).

The 68-year-old Calhoun became the oldest coach to win a national championship. The oldest had been Phog Allen of Kansas who was 66 when the Jayhawks won in 1952.

Shelvin Mack, who led Butler with 13 points, hit a 3 with less than a second to play in the first half to give the Bulldogs a 22-19 lead and Chase Stigall hit a 3 just 22 seconds into the second half for a six-point lead — the biggest of the game by either team to that point. After that, it was all Huskies.

Butler had two long droughts in the second half as Connecticut built the lead to as many as 13 points.

The Bulldogs went 7:07 without a field goal — missing 13 shots — and the Huskies went from down 25-19 to taking a 33-26 lead.

The second Connecticut run saw the Bulldogs go 6:09 without a basket, and the Huskies took a 41-28 lead on a jumper with 7:32 to play. Butler missed nine shots in that span, and when Andrew Smith scored — he converted another one of the many misses — the crowd gave a sarcastic cheer.

At 22-19, it was the lowest scoring first half since 1946.

Butler was 6 for 27 from the field (22.2 percent), including 5 of 14 from 3-point range. The Huskies weren’t much better, shooting 29 percent (9 of 31), and they missed all five of their shots from behind the arc.

The scoring was extremely slow. The Bulldogs started 2 of 15 from the field, both baskets being 3-pointers in nine attempts.

The Huskies reached the championship game by beating fourth-seeded Kentucky 56-55, while Butler moved on with a 70-62 victory over Virginia Commonwealth, just the third No. 11 seed to reach the Final Four.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)

Ian Eagle comes on at 5:40 to talk about The NCAA Tournament, and Mikuni Restaurant Group, Inc. comes in studio at 6:40 till the end to talk about their efforts to help those affected by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Kentucky, Connecticut, Butler and Virginia Commonwealth — the improbable, the implausible, the unthinkable and the downright unimaginable.

In one game in Houston next Saturday, No. 4 seed Kentucky will play No. 3 Connecticut — not a completely absurd thought as a Final Four matchup, though hardly a trendy pick given their up-and-down regular seasons.

In the other game, it will be No. 11 Virginia Commonwealth against No. 8 Butler — the team that was panned when its name was called on Selection Sunday against the defending national runner-up from a 4,500-student campus whose amazing success story had supposedly run its course.

“It never gets old,” Bulldogs senior Matt Howard said.

Nor does the NCAA tournament, the three-week office pool that places the so-called experts on even footing with those who fill out brackets because they like a team’s colors or its mascot.

Anything goes. Anyone can win.

And never has that been more true than this year.

Four teams with a combined 37 losses and a combined winning percentage of .755, second lowest since 1985.

Four teams whose combined seeding equals 26, breaking the record of 22 in 2000.

Not a single No. 1 seed for only the third time since seeding began in 1979 and, according to STATS LLC., the first time that no 1 or 2 seed will be there.

ESPN, which sponsors one of the country’s biggest bracket tournaments, said that out of 5.9 million entries, only two had this foursome making its way to Houston. President Barack Obama? He went 0 for 4. He had plenty of company.

Kentucky is the new favorite in Vegas, at 8-5. VCU is listed at 7-1 — the longshot in the field, but still quite a bit better than 2500-1, which is where the Rams were listed at the start of the season.

“I think what it does as much as anything, it just puts a spin on the NCAA tournament,” said Kansas coach Bill Self after his top-seeded team lost 71-61 to VCU. “It’s wild. … Because seeds are so overrated. It’s about matchups. And their players could play for us any day.”

VCU (28-11) got up early on Kansas on Sunday and never looked back, another upset winner in a tournament that’s all about underdogs.

“Our guys have done a phenomenal job of putting all the doubters aside, putting all the people that didn’t believe in us aside and going out and doing their job,” VCU coach Shaka Smart said.

The Rams are the third No. 11 seed to make the Final Four and the first since George Mason in 2006, which also hails from the Colonial Athletic Conference. But the Rams are the first ever that will need to win seven games — not the usual six — to win the title. They were one of the last at-large teams to make the newfangled 68-team field. They played in the new “First Four” — an extra round that was added as part of the NCAA’s new $10.8 billion TV deal.

Now they’re in the Final Four.

They’ll play Butler (27-9), which slumped through big chunks of this season, a somewhat predictable result after what was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Final Four last year, played a scant six miles from their Indianapolis campus.

This year, the destination is Reliant Stadium — 1,036 miles away. The Bulldogs are once again proving that all it takes is good players — not a power conference, a big school or gobs of money — to compete on the biggest stage in college sports.

Last season, in one of the most epic finishes in Final Four history, Gordon Hayward’s halfcourt shot banked off glass, nicked off the rim and barely bounded out to leave Butler two points short of Duke for the national title.

It was a heartbreaker, but maybe one that set the Bulldogs up for a repeat. They’ve won one game by one, another by two and another by three on this year’s road to the Final Four. They beat Florida 74-71 in overtime Saturday to make their second straight trip.

“I think it (last year) helps you with knowing how you need to prepare and what you should do and what you should not do,” Howard said. “I think that will help us.”

Though UConn and Kentucky each struggled at times this season, they’ve had Final Four pedigrees for years (decades when it comes to the Wildcats) and they lived up to them this month.

Connecticut was 9-9 in the Big East this season but won an unprecedented five games in five days in the conference tournament to win its first big trophy of March. The big question was whether the Huskies, led by one of the nation’s best players in Kemba Walker, would have enough energy to keep things going in the NCAA.

Short answer: Yes.

They held off Arizona 65-63 on Saturday and are in the Final Four for the fourth time since 1999.

“I’ve been fortunate over 39 years to have a lot of teams do a lot of different things,” coach Jim Calhoun said, “but never could I imagine the team winning nine games in tournament play in 19 days.”

To win No. 10, UConn (30-9) must beat Kentucky, a team led by three freshmen that might, nonetheless, have its biggest star on the bench. Coach John Calipari joined Rick Pitino as the only coaches to lead three different programs to the Final Four.

Brandon Knight, Doron Lamb and Terrence Jones are the three freshmen who helped the Wildcats (29-8) get to the Final Four for the first time since their 1998 national title team.

This was a team that lost four out of seven earlier this season and looked every bit as close to the tournament bubble as a national championship. Since then, the Wildcats have won 10 straight, including the 76-69 win over North Carolina on Sunday.

“We got Kentucky back,” senior forward Josh Harrelson said. “A lot of people really didn’t think we would be the team we are. We know we struggled early in the season, lost a couple of close games that we should have won. And you know, we really pulled it together as a team. And, you know, we’re back now.”

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)