Unlike Jayhawks, Lobos have made being swept a habit
UNM faces Air Force on Wednesday, hosts Utah State on Saturday
Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball and, as it turns out, is still the only coach in the history of the storied Kansas basketball program to finish his career with a losing record.
Safe to say things worked out all right for the Jayhawks, who are sitting at No. 1 in both polls and whose head coach, Bill Self, has managed to get through another season without being swept by a conference rival. It continues a remarkable run that has no comparison anywhere in the game.
Since taking over after Roy Williams bolted to North Carolina in 2003, Self has taken the Jayhawks to the Final Four four times and won the national title in 2008.
Now in is in his 17th season, the only time anyone from the Big 12 swept his Jayhawks in the regular season was 2017-18 when Oklahoma State somehow pulled it off.
That’s 145 regular season home-andhome series with league rivals and he’s only been swept once.
For comparison, New Mexico has already been swept by three teams this season and seven times in head coach Paul Weir’s three-year tenure atop the program. Dating to Self ’s first year in Lawrence, Kan., when Ritchie McKay was calling the shots at UNM, the Lobos have been swept in the Mountain West 23 times.
Fortunately for them, neither of the final two teams on the Lobos’ schedule can do it. UNM (17-12, 6-10) visits Air Force (10-18, 4-12) on Wednesday night and hosts Utah State (22-7, 11-5) on Saturday in the regular season finale.
The Lobos beat Air Force in January and get just one shot at Utah State as part of the MWC’s imbalanced 18-game schedule.
For the record, McKay’s teams were swept eight times between the start of Self ’s run and the time UNM fired him in 2007.
Steve Alford’s teams were swept four times, as were Craig Neal’s.
Enter Weir, whose dysfunctional band of misfits in 2019-20 is nearing the end
of its run, he’s been swept three times in each of the last two seasons, twice by UNLV.
The biggest benefactors of having UNM on the schedule in Self ’s KU timeline? San Diego State has gone 2-0 half a dozen times while UNLV has done it five times and BYU three times before saying adios to the Mountain West in 2011.
Nine different teams have completed the sweep with the only current MWC rivals not to do it being Wyoming, Colorado State and San Jose State. But don’t worry; there’s always next year.
NOTES
Another missing piece: Tavian Percy has been lost of the remainder of the season after suffering a foot injury in Monday’s practice in Albuquerque. As has become the case with UNM, details from the team’s sports information department were scarce.
A 6-foot-6 sophomore guard out of Miami, Percy has appeared in 23 games and averaged 1.7 points with 0.7 rebounds. He has made two starts, but his role with the team has largely been as a backup who averages less than 11 minutes a game.
He didn’t make the trip with the team to Colorado Springs for Wednesday’s game.
Limping along: Guard Vante Hendrix didn’t play in UNM’s loss at Boise State over the weekend, and guard Zane Martin didn’t get into the game until the second half. Weir said after the game that both were experiencing issues with punctuality, although he didn’t elaborate.
UNM has been mum on whether either or both players will be available at Air Force. The Lobos open as 1.5-point favorites, and a win would nail down the No. 7 seed at the MWC Tournament and allow them to avoid top seed San Diego State until the finals — assuming they somehow get through the first three rounds to even reach the championship game.