OKLAHOMA CITY — So much for Tennessee playing NCAA games in consecutive road environments.
Selection Monday revealed the potential of top-seeded Tennessee playing a second-round game at Purdue and then meeting Oklahoma in the regional semifinals at the Ford Center, just a half-hour drive from Norman, Okla.
Tennessee routed the Boilermakers on their home floor last Tuesday. But Notre Dame upset fourth-seeded Oklahoma just hours later, costing Oklahoma City a chance to host a nearby team and thousands of dollars in ticket sales.
Tim Brassfield, executive director of the Oklahoma City All Sports Association, hopes fans will at least fill the Ford Center’s lower bowl. He said 9,200 fans bought tickets Saturday for tonight’s semifinal games.
“My hope is we’ll be at that 11,000 mark when all is said and done,” he said. “That’s a nice lower-bowl crowd. If the Sooners were here, it would have been 17-18,000. We would have been pushing a sellout.”
The Ford Center holds 18,700. A curtain will cover the upper deck if the event doesn’t sell more tickets, a reality Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw is trying to change.
“We’re combing the state for Catholics right now,” she said. “I’m hoping to fill up the arena and get all the Catholic school kids out here. We were practicing over at the Fighting Irish gym at Bishop McGuinness (a local Catholic high school). I’m hoping the people will come out. I plan on wearing red and hope the Oklahoma people will cheer for us.”
Zero-for-Tennessee
McGraw won a national championship in 2001, beat Connecticut and Rutgers and advanced to the Sweet 16 seven times in the last 12 years. But she has never beaten Tennessee coach Pat Summitt, a shortcoming she was reminded of again Saturday.
“I feel like it’s printed on my forehead, ‘0-for-Tennessee,’” she said, then laughed. “But I feel like I’m getting Pat at a good time. She’s coming off the shoulder injury and she’s got bad knees. I think this year if we get her in a running game, I’ve got her.”
Said Summitt when told of McGraw’s comments: “She’s going to have to take those high heels off to catch me!”
The Irish didn’t play Tennessee during their national championship season.
Calling them out
Lady Vols center Nicky Anosike didn’t exactly give Shyra Ely, Brittany Jackson and Loree Moore — seniors on the 2004 team when Anosike was a freshman — a ringing endorsement Saturday.
“I know my freshman year in the Final Four, I didn’t know anything that was going on, because no one really took the time out of their day to help me out,” she said. “So I always told myself I would never let it happen when I was a senior or when I was an upperclassman, period.”
Parker is fine
With help from athletic trainer Jenny Moshak, Tennessee star Candace Parker said she’s feeling fine after her shoulder briefly popped out of socket against Purdue last Tuesday.
“She’s the best trainer in the America, the world, ever,” Parker said. “I’m just doing rehab and icing and doing stimulating a lot. I’ll be alright.”
No pressure
McGraw noted that Oklahoma had all the pressure to win last Tuesday because a regional semifinal in Oklahoma City awaited the winner of their game. Notre Dame’s players said the same about their matchup with the Lady Vols, the defending national champions.
“We’re having fun right now. There’s no pressure on us at all,” Notre Dame junior guard Lindsay Schrader said. “We’re out here having a good time. We’re going to play hard, and that’s it. We’re going to go out there and fight. We have the confidence that we know we can beat them.”
That’s even after they lost 87-63 at home to Tennessee in January.
“Back then, I didn’t think we had the confidence to win,” Schrader said. “Just our improvement since January — our defensive improvement, our offensive improvement — that’s where our confidence comes in. We’re peaking right now. We weren’t back then. We want to go out there and show them how good of a team we really are.”
