Butler’s Final Four run is hardly a fairy tale, but Coach Brad Stevens is another story

Reporting from Indianapolis — 

A thumbnail report on the Final Four coaches includes one coach who sticks out like a sore thumb.

There are three hard-core veterans — Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo and Bob Huggins — and your local grocery bagger.

This is the Fab Four of John, Paul, George and Opie.

Have you seen Butler Coach Brad Stevens?

He’s 33 going on his driving learner’s permit. It’s not a joke that Stevens is often mistaken for one of his players, and there’s a rumor afloat that Duke’s Coach K shaves more in a day than Stevens does in a week.

“My age is what it is,” Stevens said Friday at Lucas Oil Stadium. “My age has no factor on how our team plays.”

That has become clear. Butler (32-4) is riding a 24-game winning streak entering Saturday’s NCAA semifinal against Michigan State.

Despite all of the “ Hoosiers” comparisons, Butler is not an underdog story. Yes, the Bulldogs play at famed Hinkle Field House, where upstart Milan High won the 1954 state title. It was the inspiration for the movie starring Gene Hackman.

To the hoop heads who sneaker-squeak through Indianapolis, basketball’s Downtown Disney, “Hoosiers” is a rite of passage equivalent to baseball’s “Field of Dreams.”

Yet, it’s hard to get too sentimental about a Butler team that oddsmakers have made a favorite against Michigan State. The Bulldogs started the year ranked in the top 10, have been to nine of the last 14 NCAA tournaments and have a future NBA player in Gordon Hayward.

Butler has defeated UCLA, Xavier, Syracuse and Kansas State this season. The Bulldogs are a No. 5-seeded team, the same as Michigan State. In 2006, 11th-seeded George Mason made the Final Four. Now that was shocking.

The story of Butler’s coach, though … well, that might be a movie.

Here he is at the Final Four, a Lilliputian surrounded by giants.

Krzyzewski is making his 11th Final Four appearance and is seeking his fourth national title. The bar is set so high back home that some people considered it a crisis that Duke hadn’t appeared in a Final Four since 2004. Krzyzewski won his first national title in Indianapolis in 1991, the same year Stevens renewed his subscription to Boys’ Life.

West Virginia Coach Bob Huggins, despite having never won a national title, is considered one of the game’s top coaches. He has amassed 670 career wins and took Cincinnati to the Final Four in 1992. Huggins might have won it all in 2000 had star center Kenyon Martin not suffered a broken leg.

Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo, making his sixth Final Four appearance, is oozing into Coach K territory. Izzo’s Spartans won the national title here, too, in 2000.

Stevens, at the time, was a kid out of college working for Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant.

“I was a marketing associate,” he said. “My main role was metrics and incentives for one of their sales groups.”

That’s when, he explained, “you come up with measurements that they try to achieve to be incentivized to reach sales goals and ultimately are rewarded either financially, or whatever the case may be, by reaching those sales goals.”

Stevens’ first love, though, was basketball. A former player at Zionsville (Ind.) High and DePauw University, Stevens was a volunteer high school assistant in the summer of 2000 when he decided to ditch his day job and pursue a coaching career.

“Well, now it looks like a great idea,” Stevens said. “At the time, I just thought it was something I really wanted to try.”

He became a volunteer in the Butler basketball office and worked his way up the staff directory.

In 2007, when Todd Lickliter left for Iowa, Stevens, then 30, became the head coach.

It’s worked out OK if you consider a record of 88-14 in three seasons OK. Stevens is the youngest coach to take a team to the Final Four since Bob Knight, at 32, led Indiana to St. Louis in 1973.

The youngest coach to lead his team to the national title was Indiana’s Branch McCracken, at 31, in 1940.

Stevens doesn’t act or coach like he’s in over his head. In fact, he is chided for his zombie-like, calm bench demeanor — a trait not always shared by the other three Final Four coaches.

“He doesn’t get rattled easily,” Michigan State’s Izzo said. “I saw some games when he was down three, up three, seems to stay at a pretty even keel. I wish I could do that.”

Stevens is a man of quiet resolve and routine. He plans practice each week at the same restaurant, the Broad Ripple Tavern.

“It’s got a great little back eating area,” he said. “Get the same thing every week. Pretty boring.”

Nothing is a snore anymore about Butler, located about five miles north of downtown. The Butler bus on Friday was mobbed by fans wanting to get a glimpse of their stars.

“It was unbelievable,” Stevens said.

Once, in a basketball movie shot in Butler’s gym, the coach used a measuring tape to prove to his team that the basket was 10 feet high for both schools.

Izzo, the underdog against Butler, might consider showing the movie to Michigan State.

chris.dufresne@latimes.com