The good news is Bob Driscoll made it to San Antonio. Yesterday, Providence College’s athletic director got to work.

Flight cancellations forced Driscoll to juggle his travel plans and he didn’t arrive at the Final Four until late Friday. He spent yesterday meeting with prospective coaches for the Friars’ men’s basketball opening, one of many that have become the talk of the Final Four. The National Association of Basketball Coaches holds its convention at the Final Four so the city is awash with coaches and rumors about who could fill major openings like those available at PC, Marquette, LSU, Oklahoma State and Oregon State.

Brown’s Craig Robinson and Ohio University’s Tim O’Shea are two coaches likely to be on Driscoll’s short list. Driscoll could not be reached yesterday to comment on the search process. Robinson intrigues PC because of his school-record 19 wins in his second season at Brown, his impressive communication skills and he’d also be the school’s first-ever minority head coach. O’Shea is a Wayland, Mass., native who helped stock Al Skinner’s teams at URI and Boston College with players like Cuttino Mobley, Troy Bell and Craig Smith. He’s coached seven seasons at Ohio University and won 19 or more games in each of the last four seasons.

It’s unclear who else PC may be focused on but an interesting name to appear in some circles yesterday was that of Virginia head coach Dave Leitao. A native of New Bedford, Leitao was the 2007 ACC Coach of the Year in his second season and the Cavaliers finished 17-16 this year. He has two years left on his contract.

Bad time for Good to leave

Word out of San Antonio is that Bryant University coach Max Good has been contacted by new Loyola-Marymount coach Billy Bayno about an associate head coaching position. Good, who could not be reached yesterday for comment, worked with Bayno a decade ago at UNLV.

Bryant is in position to make its move to Division I in basketball next season almost solely because of the coaching exploits of Good. The school was a non-player on the Div. II front before Good was hired and he’s led the Bulldogs to five NCAA tournament appearances, including the national championship game three years ago. Bryant is set to take major lumps over the next 3-4 years as it transitions to Div. I but some recent wins on the recruiting trail by Good’s staff (like 6-foot-7 forward Romeric Lasme of Winchendon Prep) have shown the Bulldogs are on the right track. Losing a coach like Good would be a setback Bryant could ill-afford at this point in the program’s history.

Boeheim: No love for 65

Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim is perhaps the most out-spoken critic of the NCAA’s decision to hold the line at 65 teams in its basketball tournament. No doubt because getting to the NCAA’s is harder than ever in the Big East, don’t look for Boeheim’s protests to stop. Last season 47 percent of college football teams went to bowl games. A shade under 20 percent of the 328 D-1 hoop teams make the NCAA. Throw in the NIT and the CBI and that number is still only 34 percent, a number basketball coaches don’t think is very fair.

“With coaches who are getting fired, one of the first things they say is, ‘You didn’t make the tournament in four years.’ That’s an issue. The tournament is an issue,” Boeheim told the Chicago Tribune. “This never was an issue 20 years ago. But once smaller schools started breaking through because of the balance and everything, now every school thinks it should be in the tournament. Whether that’s realistic or not, I don’t know. But if you’re not in the tournament [for a while], chances are if you’ve been at a school for very long, you’re going to get fired.

“That’s always been there [at the bigger schools]. Now it’s everywhere. That’s where the change is. No question it’s probably the main issue in coaching today — you didn’t make the tournament.”

Crean is Marquette’s loss

This is another example of how fans sometimes don’t have a clue. For the last few years, Tom Crean has led Marquette into the upper half of the Big East on a yearly basis and never missed the NCAA’s. Yet when the Golden Eagles failed to win an NCAA tourney game the last three years, fans in Milwaukee grumbled.

Well this year Marquette did win its first round game but Crean is gone. He’s so ‘bad’ that Indiana snapped him up to the tune of a reported eight-year, $18 million deal. Indiana agreed to pay $650,000 to help buy out Crean’s Marquette contract (where he had nine years left) but Crean will owe IU $3 million if he resigns in the first three years of his deal.

Best of the rest…

The national Gatorade Player of the Year award goes to Jrue Holiday, a guard from California heading to UCLA in the fall. The Rhode Island winner was Ashton Watkins (Classical) while the pick in Massachusetts was Rhode Island signee Stevie Mejia, the 5-9 point guard from Lawrence Academy. … According to the New England Recruiting Report, West Greenwich big man (6-9) Ben Crenca currently lists Vermont, Rhode Island, Fairfield, American, New Hampshire, Northeastern, and Boston University as the schools that have offered him a scholarship. … Consider this nugget from Boeheim, also from the Chicago Tribune. “Sometimes when you bring in a new coach, it works wonders. But for every time that works, it gets worse sometimes. It’s a coin flip, it really is, when you bring in a new coach. You can be as smart as you want, hire who looks like the best guy possible and there’s a good, 50-percent chance the guy will not be successful. That’s just the way it is.”

kmcnamar@projo.com