Badly edited ramblings of a delirious Jayhawk; read at your own risk.

            For the past 18 months we’ve been in this kind of bizarre cycle where all of the teams that we have anything to do with win everything in sight.   We’re living in Boston for a couple of years, my family and me, and you probably all know that the Boston sports teams have been on a historic roll, winning the World Series, going into the Super Bowl undefeated and, most improbably, the Celtics leapfrogging the entire NBA in one off-season.  We are also lifelong Kansas Jayhawk fans, have been season ticket holders to Jayhawk games for many years until we came to Boston.   The Jayhawk football team last year won all its games except one, won the Orange Bowl and may well have been, in reality, the best team in the country, although they didn’t poll well because

            a)  they played a soft non-conference schedule, and

            b)  people aren’t accustomed to thinking of the Jayhawks as a powerhouse football team.

            Probably they weren’t the best, but probably they were the second-best, behind LSU.   Maybe they weren’t the best basketball team, either, but it doesn’t matter now because nobody’s ever going to know that.   Last night, of course, the Jayhawk basketball team won the NCAA basketball championship for what the media insists is only the third time ever.   This always bothers me, as a

            a)  Jayhawk, and

            b)  old person.

            Until 1939 the NCAA basketball championship was determined not by a tournament but by a poll.   Kansas won the championship by poll I think six times. .. that’s from memory; in fact, this is ALL from memory and I didn’t check any of it.   That was a long time ago now, but when I first became a basketball fan in the mid-1950s it wasn’t long ago at all; it was about as long ago as it is now since NCAA football made a similar transition, from championships won only in the polls to championships won in pre-arranged matches.   It hasn’t worked as well in football, but saying that the Jayhawks have won only three NCAA basketball championships is exactly like saying Alabama and Nebraska never won any in football.   They won a bunch of national football championships; they just haven’t won any since you decided to start counting them. 

            Anyway, since you decided to start counting them we won in 1952, which was Clyde Lovellette’s team, and in 1988, which was Danny Manning’s team, and then we won last night, which was a team team; everybody out there was really good, and it is difficult to say who was the best.   Actually it isn’t that difficult; the best player on the team quite certainly is Mario Chalmers, but Chalmers isn’t the leading scorer and to get why he is the best player you have to be either

            a)  a hardcore Jayhawk fan, or

            b)  a stat analyst.

            Or take my word for it.    Chalmers is a natural point guard and will be an NBA point guard, but the Jayhawks have two other extremely good point guards, so he has had to slide over to the 2 spot, which is among the reasons not everybody gets him.   “The media”—the amorphous and defenseless media which is the whipping boy of everybody with a whip and a grudge—has decided that Brandon Rush is the star of the team and just needs to be more aggressive and look for his shot more, be a little more selfish, and we have been hearing this for years.   The reality is that Rush is the fifth-best player on the team but leads the team in scoring because he shoots too damn much, but let me move on.   Rush is a great player, too; he’s an NBA player.   So are six other guys on this team, but probably none of them is an NBA star on the level of Paul Pierce or Manning or Jo Jo White, who lost his shot at an NCAA championship on a disputed out-of-bounds call, or Wilt, who lost his in triple overtime.   

            So anyway, the Jayhawks won the NCAA basketball championship last night, and I don’t blog but it’s a special moment for me and I’m going to write this one blog about it, trying to capture the moment as much for myself as for you.   I don’t blog because a blog is too casual for me.   That’s just my own take; I’m 58 and I think about some things the way old people do.   I think of a blog as casual and personal.   I don’t blog; I do research, and then I report on the research.   Of course, many bloggers also do research, in many cases I am certain better research than I do, but. . .that’s just the way I think about it.  

            There are two things that made this team great. . ..well, seven NBA players and a great coach is eight things, but I am going to summarize them into two.  

            1)  Four good big guys, and

            2)  Extraordinary quickness on the perimeter.

            And Brandon Rush. . .Rush is the one player on the team who is neither an NBA 4/5 bench player or a quick perimeter player.

            Anyway, when Kansas was preparing to play North Carolina we heard a lot about how extraordinarily quick Ty Lawson is, and when we were preparing to play Memphis we heard a lot about how phenomenally quick Derrick Rose is.  What you really couldn’t explain to people before last night is that Kansas has three guys like that—Robinson, Collins and Chalmers.   They’re all phenomenally quick.   I’m not saying that any of them is quicker than Rose or Lawson, my quick is quicker than your quick; I don’t even know how one measures quickness, so I don’t know what kind of objective standard you’d use to sort that out.   They’re all on that same level; they’re all really quick.  

            Memphis is a great team, Carolina is a great team, and I’m not too confident that if we played either of them again we would beat them again.   But when you first play Kansas that extraordinary quickness on the perimeter is hard to adjust to.   Three really quick guys, working together, can pretty effectively stop one really quick guy from doing what he is in the habit of doing.  Kansas was fumble-fingered to start the game and fell into a 9-3 hole, but took charge and was up 22-15 or 22-16, and was up five at halftime, 33-28.  

            It was five points, but it looked like more.   With about five minutes to go in the first half it suddenly became apparent that Memphis was struggling to keep the game from getting out of hand.   They were tired, frustrated, a step slow, and they were on the ropes.    Kansas up about five with five to go in the first half, Memphis stopped competed and started hanging on. . .slow the game down, try to avoid mistakes, try to get to the halftime buzzer still on your feet.    They had the ball with 58 seconds left in the half, and you’d figure they’d shoot at 42 seconds and trade two possessions for one, but you knew they wouldn’t because they were so tired they didn’t want to have to play any more possessions than they had to.  They ran out the clock, Kansas tipped the rebound out of bounds and they ran out the rest of the clock. 

            Well, you don’t win a game in the first half, so I understood why Bill Self kind of played along with that, let Memphis walk into the halftime down by only five.   

            Another thing that was important. . .the referees really were in “let them play” mode the entire game, from the opening whistle.   There was a lot of pushing, shoving even tripping and colliding that wasn’t being called either way.   This worked very much to Kansas’ advantage because Kansas has more big bodies inside.   I always thought that if I was a referee I would have little sympathy for people who play defense by trying to draw charging calls.   My theory would be “if you can stop him, stop him; if you can’t, get out of his way because I’m not not giving it to you.”   That was the way they were calling that, too; there were very few charging calls, and several times, on those charging/blocking marginal calls, the referees simply refused to call charging or blocking or anything; you guys sort that out.   If they had called the pushing and shoving (and slapping and reaching and charging and blocking) Kansas’ big guys could have gotten into foul trouble, which could have let Dorsey get some operating room inside.   But it didn’t happen that way, so Kansas leaned on Dorsey all night, and he got frustrated and started begging for calls

Memphis came out in the second half, had a short burst of energy to get the game even, and then started trying to shorten the game.

            Kansas was in a zone much or most of the second half. . .I don’t know what they call it, but I would call it a matchup zone.   A kind of a 2-1-2 with everybody inside the paint all the time but never challenging anybody unless they tried to come inside.   I could understand Kansas planning to use that defense, because Memphis is extremely athletic.   “Athletic” is a term with a definition so broad as to be nearly useless, but what it meant was that Memphis had a bunch of bigger guys who were also quick.  Memphis’ players were very much the same kind of players that Kansas has—quick, athletic, aggressive.   Bill Self tried and failed to recruit several of Memphis’ best players, and I’m sure Calipari tried and failed to recruit some of Kansas’ players; they were all from the same talent pool.  

            But as it happened, Kansas wound up with the really big guys and the perimeter guys, and Brandon Rush, and Memphis wound up with all the other guys like Brandon Rush—the 6-4 to 6-8 quick, strong athletic guys who could handle the ball and drive to the basket, and also they pass really, really well. . Memphis does.   Their ball movement, when they were challenged man to man, was outstanding.   Kansas stayed in the zone because they didn’t want those 6-6, 6-8 guys to get loose and find a lane to the basket, and also when you challenged them on the ball they would send that ball whipping around the court so fast it would make your head spin, and somebody would be wide open somewhere. 

            I understood using a zone defense against that, but two minutes into the second half Memphis started cutting the possessions down.   Memphis would come down, set up outside the perimeter, and just dribble and pass the ball around the perimeter until the clock was almost out, then they’d get something up.   They were saving as much energy as they could to play defense, and also they were trying to cut down the number of possessions.   Everybody seemed happy with that; Memphis was happy with that because they were saving energy and cutting down the clock, and Kansas was happy with it because they weren’t getting into foul trouble and they didn’t have to see the basketball zipping around the court and people running around and getting wide open.

            From my standpoint, this was a tacit admission that Memphis couldn’t compete with Kansas in a “real” basketball game, an up-and-down game.   Tacit, hell; it was an open acknowledgement that they couldn’t.   Memphis had been beating people in Chicago-style street basketball all year, and Calipari essentially acknowledged that if it was that kind of a game they were going to get annihilated.

            So the game is even, lead changing hands back and forth for about ten minutes.  Memphis is playing hard on defense and just working the clock on offense.   I thought, just as a fan. .. I thought with about twelve minutes to go in the game that Self should have started challenging the ball, trying to trap the ball handler and trying to disrupt the passes, abandoning the zone if necessary but at least stretching it out to challenge the perimeter.   Yes, it would have led to Memphis whipping the ball around the floor and dashing around the gym and getting some wide-open baskets, but it would also have led to a frenzied, harried, frantic type of pace, and I didn’t think Memphis could hang with us in that kind of a game; I thought that as soon as the game got ragged Kansas would pull ten points ahead.   

            But the game never got ragged (until overtime) and with about five minutes to go in regulation Kansas switched to a box-and-one with a man chasing Chris Douglas-Roberts, Memphis’ best offensive finisher.    The box and one only lasted three possessions, but it nearly proved disastrous.   Calipari’s eyes lit up as soon as he saw it, and Memphis quickly surged ahead.  Kansas dropped back into the matchup zone, but Memphis scored again and was nine points ahead with 2:13 to go.

            And then, unbelievably, everything broke Kansas’ way.   Not everything; there was a critical rebound we didn’t get, and one time Sherron Collins slipped and fell catching a pass, but. . .nearly everything.    Kansas came out of its defensive shell and got aggressive, as I had wanted them to ten minutes earlier.  When you’re behind and the clock is running out you have to foul and hope they miss the foul shots; you have to do it but it never works—but it did.   When you put yourself in a position where you have to hit a three the three never falls—but it did.   On top of that there was a stolen in-bounds pass and a tremendously fortunate foul by Dorsey, 30 feet from the basket on a man driving parallel to the bench, which carried Dorsey officially out of the game; he’d been sort of lost within the game for 30 minutes anyway, but it helped not to have to keep pushing him away from the boards.   The game went into overtime, but Memphis never showed up for the overtime; Kansas got the lead and when Memphis had to start lunging for the ball the game just go away from them.

            I thought Calipari was very dignified and very classy in defeat.   He took all of the blame on himself, pointing out that, with Memphis ahead in the closing minutes, he was just trying to get to the finish line with Memphis still ahead, and he gambled and lost keeping his guys in the game when he didn’t have to.   All year he’d been resting his key players 12-13 minutes a game, but, with Memphis in position to win the game, he gambled on letting them finish it out.   They ran out of gas at the end and clanked their free throws and fouled out and couldn’t defend.  

            That’s not a bad synopsis of what happened, but. . ..he didn’t get out-coached.   One more free throw goes in, we’re second-guessing Self all summer for staying back in the zone until he was in a desperate situation and just couldn’t. 

            With about four minutes to go there was a possession on which Memphis ran the clock down to the closing seconds, couldn’t get a good shot, and finally Derrick Rose threw up a desperation shot which banked off the glass and went in.   It was originally ruled a three, but the video showed that, while Rose jumped backward so that he was well outside the three-point line, when he jumped his foot was like a foot inside the three-point line, a long ways inside.   He was jumping backward not to get a three but because Darnell Jackson was in his face, and what none of the announcers ever noticed, showing the replay eight times, was that Jackson actually deflected the shot; the reason it went off the glass was that Jackson got a finger on it, deflecting it way off course, and it was just luck that it bounced off the glass and in.   That shot made it something like 57-50, and Memphis went up I think 62-53 with just over two minutes to play.  Nine points in two minutes is not a safe lead, but. . ..you’re up nine with two to play, you’re going to win 98% of the time, at least.

            Post-game, the second-guessing focused on Calipari’s failure to call a time out with about ten seconds to go.    Memphis is up 63-60 with ten seconds left, Calipari said that his team was trying to foul, but the videotape shows clearly that they weren’t.   The officials still were in “let them play” mode, as they had been all game.   Sherron Collins tripped as he was handing off to Chalmers and went sprawling on the court, but Rose was putting up his hands and backing off, like “I didn’t do it. . .don’t call no foul on me.”   Jay Bilas said and the old coaches all agreed that Calipari should have called a timeout and made certain that his players understood what the game plan was.   Perhaps he should have: I don’t know. 

            It was a great game, a national championship game that was worthy of the position.   I remember the 1988 championship game vividly to this day, I’ll remember this one, and I think I enjoyed this one more, although I certainly missed being in Lawrence for the celebration.   I wanted to put some of this down on paper while it was fresh in my mind, and I appreciate your patience if you’re still reading.