ATLANTA — Two different venues at the SEC men’s basketball tournament shaped two different perspectives on luck this weekend in Atlanta.

Lucky to be alive.

Lucky to see a basketball game.

Mississippi State fan Mike Ellard, from Natchez, Miss., wanted to celebrate what he thought would be his team’s win over Alabama by leaving the Georgia Dome and grabbing a beer at Jocks and Jills, a nearby sports bar. But Alabama’s Mykal Riley rattled home a buzzer-beating 3-pointer and Ellard remained in his seat for overtime.

Minutes after Riley’s shot, heavy siding fell 29 stories from the top of the Georgia Dome and landed on stairs and walkways surrounding the complex. One red piece of siding was seen on a street one block away.

A light pole fell across Courtland Street. Construction crews worked throughout Saturday cleaning up glass and attempting to clear streets after a tornado struck downtown at about 9:40 p.m. Friday. And Ellard watched the scene outside of Stats, a sports bar not far from the Georgia Dome, and realized how close he was to witnessing the destruction.

“We were too stupid to know what was going on,” he said.

Added Kentucky fan Dan Feltner: “When we walked out and saw it, we said, ‘Man, we’re lucky.’”

John Haynes, a Tennessee fan from Jacksonville, Fla., stood in the rain and hail Saturday afternoon after Georgia beat Kentucky. He was not one of the 400 Tennessee fans on a list to see Saturday night’s semifinal game against Arkansas at Alexander Memorial Coliseum on the campus of Georgia Tech.

But a security guard felt sympathy for Haynes and the other 100 or so fans hoping to fill one of the many empty seats inside the arena and let them inside two hours before tipoff. Did security intend to make them leave once the storm passed?

“They’re going to have to drag me out of here,” Haynes said. “Man, I’m lucky.”

Stories like Haynes’ accompanied almost all of the 1,458 fans fortunate enough to see the first game. One family in blue with children earned entrance by telling the guard a story of traveling all day to see the game. One fan said he saw people hopping a fence and sneaking in the arena. Some fans offered money to members of the media for their credentials.

Persistent Kentucky fans got into the arena and made up most of the crowd to experience a game atmosphere Saturday that resembled a high school tournament.

“I think that means everybody wasn’t quite ready for this,” said Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton, who expressed surprise at seeing so much blue.

Bruce Wooley, a Chattanooga minister, spent most of his Saturday watching the weather from a hotel room and questioning whether he should even attempt to see the game.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

Wooley entered the arena an hour later with an Arkansas sweatshirt and a wide smile.

“A lot of people were turned away, but I was on the list because I bought my tickets through the school,” he said. “Wow. I’ve seen more people at a state basketball tournament.”

The scene on Georgia Tech’s campus — cars blaring the radio call of the game and fans begging for tickets — culminated a wild 18 hours after the tornado forced the SEC to switch venues overnight. The SEC wanted to continue the tournament because athletic directors from Mississippi State, Kentucky and Arkansas felt they were still on the NCAA bubble.

“Other than Tennessee, we had no assurances that the rest of us are in that tournament yet,” Mississippi State athletic director Larry Templeton said. “If we would have had an assurance there were four out of five of us in, there probably would have been a different decision.”

At 1 a.m. Saturday, a group of SEC officials and athletic directors from the five remaining schools in the tournament decided to move the event to Georgia Tech. Georgia Dome officials, upon a closer look at the damage and the radar showing more storms, said they didn’t feel the facility was safe.

The group decided on the new format — forcing the Kentucky-Georgia winner to play twice Saturday — at around 3 a.m. Officials then elected to allow each team’s traveling party into the arena and give each school 400 tickets. At 4 a.m., the SEC released its plan.

After Georgia beat Kentucky in overtime, coach Dennis Felton expressed his outrage at the new format. He wanted the two semifinal games to be played Sunday morning and then the title game in the afternoon, forcing two teams to play twice in a day. The championship game is today at 3:30 p.m. on ESPN2.

Schools will be given 1,000 tickets instead of 400 because there will be two fewer teams.

“I very, very respectfully take great exception to the decision to make a team play two games in a row in games that are so important,” Felton said. “I think everybody understands that this tournament is our only chance to make it to the national tournament. I can’t help but feel that when that decision was made, they made it knowing well that they were basically eliminating our chances of winning the tournament.”

Felton wasn’t the only angry person inside the arena. Fans who spent thousands getting to the game but left without a way to get inside the coliseum expressed outrage because of all the empty seats and wondered why the SEC just didn’t allow the first 9,191 — a capacity crowd — in the game.

“Because of the next 9,000,” SEC associate commissioner Charles Bloom said. “For that large of a crowd, you’re talking about more security, more police, more rescue, more ushers. You need more people at concessions. You need all of these kinds of people. We’re sitting there at 3 a.m. Who are we going to call?”

For Ellard, it’s probably a rental car company. He flew to Atlanta but didn’t think he could get into any of the games.

Some people would say he’s unlucky. Standing near all the damage downtown, he would probably disagree.

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