AD: NCAA sorry for late flight

After Aggies coach Marvin Menzies and the players fulfilled their postgame interview obligations, the team, pep band and cheerleaders went back to the hotel 15 miles east of downtown Spokane and quickly packed while hotel employees prepared 70 box lunches. The Aggies arrived at the airport, which is west of downtown, at about 1 a.m. The plane departed at about 2:15 a.m. and arrived in El Paso, Texas, at around 7 a.m.Only one bus was waiting. The team and some boosters were bused to Las Cruces, N.M., while everyone else had to wait for the bus to make the 2?-hour round trip to pick them up.

"That part of it was probably the most disappointing thing for me, only because I knew that two-thirds of the plane was going to be disappointed that we'd flown all night, and now they've got to sit around for another two to three hours because at that point we didn't know very much information other than there was one bus," Boston said.The matter might not have been a big deal beyond Las Cruces if not for SDSU coach Steve Fisher, who ripped into the NCAA in his postgame news conference."I'm going to do something I never do. I'm going to plain about the NCAA process. And I hope somebody writes it," the normally genial Fisher said, mentioning that neither team wanted to go home that night if it lost.

 "For the billions of dollars that we have here for them not to find a way to a modate these kids, the student-athletes  You can't tell me they couldn't find charter planes. And that's what they told me. I shouldn't have to call the NCAA, and I did today to say, `Why?"Fisher even suggested that an NCAA administrator should have to fly home with a losing team "and see what it's like to get home at 5 in the morning. It shouldn't happen."Boston was AD at Minnesota for part of the time that Fisher was the coach at Michigan."I've got a lot of respect for Steve," Boston said. "I know he's a passionate person. When I saw it on YouTube I was impressed. He's a standup guy. Always has been."Mark Lewis, the NCAA's executive vice president of championships and alliances, said plaints were "fair and genuine, but the fact that we can even a plish something like this is an incredibly plex task and if the policies are something we need to work on, we'll work on them.