No one expected it to be George Mason, a No. 11 seed with a basketball budget less than one-fifth the size of Connecticut's.

But a "mid-major" was going to break through eventually. A veteran group with good guards and a top-notch coach was going to reach the Final Four.

The mid-majors hadn't put a team on college basketball's grandest stage since 1979, but they've been gaining on the big boys for years.

They have more talent than they did a decade ago. They play tougher schedules, which means more NCAA tournament bids and better seeds. And in many cases, they're more experienced, play with more passion and have better chemistry than their major-conference foes.

George Mason didn't get lucky against Michigan State, North Carolina and Connecticut, it outplayed them — just as Bradley outplayed Kansas and Pittsburgh and Wichita State outplayed Tennessee.

To survive and advance in March, you need more than size and potential.

"Those schools are getting the opportunities now," Gonzaga Coach Mark Few said last week. "If you only let one or two of those schools in per year, it's more difficult to see the wins. Now there are five to eight in there, and you're seeing the wins."

Mid-majors are as tough to define as they are to beat. The term has traditionally been used to describe teams that don't play Division I-A football, but Villanova and Georgetown can hardly be considered mid-majors. Atlantic 10 schools don't play I-A football, either. Are Xavier, George Washington and St. Joseph's mid-majors? And what about Gonzaga, which plays in a mid-major league, the West Coast Conference, but has one of the 10 best programs in the country?

There's no right answer. But for simplicity's sake, let's define "mid-major" as any team from conferences like the WCC, Missouri Valley (Wichita State), Colonial (George Mason), Mid-American (Kent State), Ivy (Pennsylvania), Big West (Pacific), Big Sky (Montana), American East (Albany) and Horizon (Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

What isn't subject to debate is their improvement:

• Eight mid-majors have reached the Sweet 16 in the past five years, equaling the total from the previous 10 years.

• Two mid-majors have reached the Elite Eight in the past five years; in the previous 10 years, only one made it.

• A mid-major, George Mason, has reached the Final Four for the first time since 1979, when Penn and Indiana State broke through. (It's tough to call a team with Larry Bird a mid-major, but ISU plays in the Missouri Valley.)

The mid-majors had sporadic success through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. Richmond reached the Sweet 16 in 1988, and Loyola Marymount made the Elite Eight in 1990 following Hank Gathers' death. A few years later came Western Kentucky, then Chattanooga, then Valparaiso.

But it wasn't until Gonzaga's emergence in the late 1990s that the mid-majors had a torchbearer. The Zags were five points from the Final Four in 1999, then made the Sweet 16 in `00 and `01. Along the way, they received more media exposure than most major-conference programs. The attention trickled down.

"It takes teams and coaches to let other people know what's happening," Bradley assistant Lennox Forrester said, "and that was Gonzaga."

There are other factors, not the least of which was the NCAA's decision in 1992 to reduce the maximum number of scholarships for Division I basketball teams from 15 to 13. The change took several years to work its way through the system, but by the late 1990s, hundreds of former high-major recruits had become upperclassmen in mid-major programs.

At the same time, the heavyweights began losing their best young players — and their best recruits — to the NBA draft. In 1999, four Duke players were selected in the first half of the first round; two were sophomores (Elton Brand and William Avery), and one was a freshman (Corey Maggette). Two years later, the top two picks in the draft were high school players. Had Kwame Brown and Tyson Chandler opted for college, they weren't going to Wichita State or George Mason.

The NBA exodus dramatically altered the landscape — draining talent from the powerhouse programs but leaving the mid-majors relatively unscathed.

George Mason has three senior starters.

Northwestern State, which beat Iowa, had four.

"The mid-majors might not be as talented, but they have more experience," Gonzaga assistant Bill Grier said. "And when it comes to the tournament, experience is a great thing to have. You look at the mid-majors that are making these runs, and they are dominated by upperclassmen."