Luke DeCock NCAA celebrates basketball amid epochal change but football pulls strings in the shadows

HOUSTON — The Final Four has taken over Houston, where even the light rail trains are wrapped in the NASA-inspired logo, alongside the logo of one of the NCAA’s “corporate champions,” of course. It’s the same thing in Dallas, where all of the signage at both airports leaves no traveler unaware that the women are in town. The Men’s Final Four — the additional branding introduced last year after 2021’s gender-equity debacle in the women’s San Antonio bubble — is the biggest event on the NCAA calendar, the conclusion of a tournament that is its biggest revenue engine, a celebration…