The morning after upending the Final Four bracket, Connecticut and Michigan settled into the quiet rhythms of a championship off-day in San Antonio on Sunday, trading the noise of the Alamodome for closed practices, position meetings and a steady drip of scouting reports ahead of Monday night’s title game.

Both programs landed in the final by way of contests that demanded more than they had planned to spend. UConn outlasted Tennessee 74-68 on Saturday after a 14-2 run inside the final five minutes erased a six-point deficit. Michigan toppled top-overall seed Duke 79-72 in the nightcap, riding a 21-point, 11-rebound performance from sophomore forward Marcus Lattimore and a defensive scheme that held the Blue Devils to 38 percent shooting.

“There’s no version of Monday where we’re not tired,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley told reporters at a brief mid-morning availability inside the team hotel. “The job today is to be honest about that, sleep, eat, watch the right film and trust that the guys who got us here know what Monday is supposed to feel like.”

Hurley’s roster, anchored by senior guard Solomon Ball and 7-foot-1 center Anders Lindqvist, has now won 14 straight games dating to early February. Ball, who finished with 22 points and seven assists against Tennessee, is averaging 19.4 points across the tournament and has not turned the ball over more than twice in any game since the second round.

Michigan, by contrast, has been the bracket’s improbable architect. The Wolverines entered the tournament as a 4-seed and have dispatched a 1-seed, a 2-seed and now Duke en route to the program’s first championship game appearance since 2018. Head coach Dusty May, in his second year in Ann Arbor, said his staff began Sunday with a 7 a.m. film session focused almost entirely on UConn’s ball-screen defense.

“They make you uncomfortable in actions you usually feel safe in,” May said. “We have to give our guards permission to play through that discomfort. If we try to script around it, we’ll be a half-step late all night.”

Sportsbooks opened UConn as a 4.5-point favorite Sunday morning, with the line drifting to UConn -5 by early afternoon. The over/under sat at 144.5. Multiple bracketologists noted that a UConn win would give the program its third national championship in five tournaments — a run unmatched in men’s college basketball since UCLA in the 1960s and 70s.

For the city, the day brought the familiar pageantry of a Final Four weekend: ticket scalpers thinning out along East Market Street, families taking photos on the Riverwalk, and a noticeably heavier National Guard and SAPD presence around the convention district, a feature local officials have attributed in part to the elevated national-security posture during the ongoing Iran conflict. San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said in a Saturday briefing that there had been “no credible threats specific to the venue” and that arrest counts through the weekend had tracked below the comparable 2018 Final Four.

The NCAA also used the off-day to stage its annual coaches’ clinic and the men’s basketball awards ceremony at the Lila Cockrell Theatre. Purdue senior Braden Smith was named the Wooden Award winner Saturday night; the Naismith Defensive Player honors went to Houston’s Joseph Tugler. Neither plays Monday, but both made appearances at the clinic, where Hurley and May were also briefly featured in a panel moderated by ESPN’s Jay Bilas.

In on-court terms, much of the analytical conversation Sunday turned on Lattimore’s matchup with Lindqvist. Michigan’s run has been built on stretching the floor with its bigs; Lattimore is shooting 41 percent from three in the tournament. UConn has typically asked Lindqvist to hold the paint and trusted its perimeter defenders to chase. Whether Hurley adjusts that approach — perhaps by pulling Lindqvist higher into pick-and-pop coverage — is widely seen as the game’s central tactical question.

“You don’t reinvent your defense in 36 hours,” said Fran Fraschilla, a former coach and longtime ESPN analyst, in a phone interview. “But you can absolutely change which actions you switch and which you ice. That’s where the chess gets played Monday.”

Television demand, meanwhile, has been unusually strong. CBS Sports president David Berson said in a statement Sunday that Saturday’s Duke-Michigan window drew an average of 16.8 million viewers, the largest Final Four semifinal audience in seven years. Network executives privately project that a UConn-Michigan final — pairing a dominant program with a Cinderella with a recognizable brand — could clear 22 million.

Players spent the afternoon largely out of public view. UConn’s open availability lasted under 20 minutes; Michigan’s was capped at 15. Ball, asked whether the Huskies felt the weight of a possible third title in five years, smiled and shook his head. “Monday is Monday. We’ll worry about the rest in May.”

Tipoff is set for 8:50 p.m. Central on CBS. Practices reopen to the media briefly Monday afternoon, with both coaches scheduled for final pregame pressers at the Alamodome around 4 p.m. NCAA officials said additional security and traffic guidance for the downtown core would be issued Monday morning.