Miami has long been considered a football school. George Mason lost to eventual national champion Florida in the Final Four but the madness-inducing run still endears - just like it will for the Hurricanes. “When we came back, you would have thought they enrolled an extra 100,000 people while we were gone.” “That school is pretty big, so you don’t always see everybody in the same space,” Skinn said. The jubilation exploded the next week after wins over Wichita State and UConn sent the Patriots to the Final Four for the first time. The Patriots took down North Carolina two days later, creating a campus-wide euphoria back in Fairfax, Virginia. 11 seed, George Mason pulled off its first upset by knocking off Michigan State, a Final Four team the year before. “We were sitting at Coach L’s house and I can remember everyone just jumping up and down, cheering. “It was like, yeah, we’re going to watch it, but I didn’t think we’d get in,” said Folarin Campbell, a guard on the 2006 team. An at-large bid was their only hope to get into the NCAA Tournament. The Patriots shared the Colonial Athletic Association regular season title with UNC Wilmington, but lost to Hofstra in the conference tournament semifinals. Larrañaga's first Final Four run started with some Selection Sunday sweat. It’s not surprising he’s in this position. “When you have a chance to play for a guy like that, you get the results we ended up getting. “He was a teacher, he was a mentor, a wizard,” said Tony Skinn, a guard on the 2006 George Mason team who was named head coach of his alma mater on Thursday. With Larrañaga at the helm, George Mason had one of the greatest mid-major runs in NCAA Tournament history, pulling off one upset after another - and a nation of underdog fans with them - all the way to the 2006 Final Four. Larrañaga has been down this road before. “It’s like putting in your GPS, your destination, and I think we put in Houston as our destination. “You’ve got to have a vision of where you’re going," Larrañaga said. A devotee of Franklin Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Jim Larrañaga chose Habit 2 to describe Miami's first trip to the Final Four.
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