Three of the four men’s basketball programs still alive in the NCAA Tournament touched down in San Antonio on Monday, kicking off a week that will hand the city its second Final Four in three decades and run headlong into the start of Major League Baseball’s regular season on Thursday.

Tennessee was first off the runway, landing at San Antonio International just after 9 a.m. local time and busing to the team hotel along the River Walk. Duke followed in the early afternoon, with Michigan due in by early evening. UConn, which played its regional final later than the other three, is scheduled to arrive Tuesday morning. The semifinals tip off Saturday at the Alamodome; the championship game follows Monday, April 6.

“We’ve been here before, and the staff knows what this week needs to look like,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said in a videoconference from Storrs before his team flew out. “Practice habits don’t change because the building changes. The shot still has to go in.”

For the host city, the tournament’s return is the centerpiece of a months-long buildup that local officials estimate will draw 90,000 visitors and inject roughly $400 million into the regional economy. Carla Mendez, executive director of the San Antonio Sports Foundation, said hotel occupancy in the downtown corridor stood at 96 percent for the weekend and that retail and restaurant bookings along the River Walk were “essentially capped out” through Tuesday morning.

“This is the biggest event San Antonio has hosted since 2018,” Mendez said at a media briefing at the Alamodome. “Every department in the city has been preparing for two years. The only thing we cannot control is the basketball itself.”

The bracket that survived the regional weekend has drawn a national audience even by Final Four standards. Top-seeded Duke arrives with a 33-3 record and a frontcourt led by sophomore forward Marcus Whitfield, who averaged 21.4 points across the four tournament games. Michigan, the No. 2 seed in its region, has won 11 straight and leans on senior point guard Jalen Reeves, the Big Ten player of the year. Tennessee, a No. 3 seed, broke through to its first Final Four since 2024 behind a defense that ranked among the top five nationally in efficiency. UConn, seeking its third title in four seasons, has again leaned on guard play and a deep rotation under Hurley.

Oddsmakers opened Duke as a narrow favorite to win the championship at +210, with UConn at +260, Michigan at +320 and Tennessee at +475, according to lines posted Monday at major sportsbooks. “The market is treating it as effectively a four-team toss-up, which is unusual at this stage,” said Brad Voss, an oddsmaker at a Las Vegas book who declined to be named on a specific number. “Sharp money has been moving on Tennessee at the longest price.”

Practice sessions open to the media begin Wednesday, with each program allotted 50 minutes on the Alamodome floor and shorter windows for press availability. The NCAA confirmed that walkthroughs over the weekend would be closed and that the traditional “One Shining Moment” production crew had already begun assembling footage from a tournament that produced two double-digit-seed upsets in the first weekend and a Sweet 16 buzzer-beater by Michigan over Houston that has been replayed on a near loop on sports networks.

Coaching storylines have crowded the week as much as the rosters. Duke’s Jon Scheyer, in his fourth season, is searching for his first national title; a win would also push him past Mike Krzyzewski’s pace through four seasons at the program. Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, 71, is making his second Final Four appearance after decades on the doorstep. Michigan’s Juwan Howard returned to the bench this season after a two-year hiatus and has steered the Wolverines back to college basketball’s final weekend.

“It’s a sport where the bracket gives you four cracks at the lottery,” said Erika Holcomb, a college basketball analyst at the sports data firm KenPom. “Three of these coaches have lived multiple lifetimes trying to get back. The pressure on the practice floor this week is going to be very different from the pressure on Saturday.”

While San Antonio fills up, Major League Baseball is racing toward its own opening. Most clubs broke spring camps in Florida and Arizona on Monday or will do so Tuesday ahead of Thursday’s slate, which features 14 games including the league’s traditional season-opening matchup between the Cincinnati Reds and the visiting Atlanta Braves at Great American Ball Park. The Los Angeles Dodgers, defending World Series champions, open at home against the San Francisco Giants in a prime-time game.

“Everybody in this clubhouse has been ready for two weeks,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters in Glendale, Arizona. “Now it’s just about getting on the plane.”

Several teams will navigate the calendar overlap directly. The St. Louis Cardinals open Thursday in Pittsburgh, then return home for a weekend series that ends just hours before the Final Four semifinals tip off three hours south. The Texas Rangers, who open Thursday in Arlington against Seattle, said they would coordinate stadium operations with the Alamodome on traffic and air-travel patterns through the I-35 corridor.

Television executives at CBS, which holds the men’s tournament rights, and Fox, which carries Thursday’s marquee MLB broadcast, said the back-to-back stretch was expected to produce one of the heaviest combined sports-viewing weeks of the year. Final Four semifinal ratings have averaged above 14 million viewers in recent seasons, and Opening Day MLB telecasts have rebounded since 2024.

Mendez said additional traffic plans around the Alamodome and the city’s airport would be released Tuesday, and that San Antonio police would brief on security arrangements later in the week.