Ugly ride prepares Kansas for title game
Jayhawks’ survival has relied on crazy finishes
NEW ORLEANS — In its unbridled optimism, the up-against-it Kansas men’s basketball team gave Tim Tebow a run for his money Sunday.
Tebow, in his introductory news conference as a member of the New York Jets the other day, reportedly used one phrase 44 times: “I’m excited.” Though the count Sunday was unofficial, the Jayhawks, the last obstacle for an expected Kentucky national championship, might have topped Tebow with their own mantra: “We’ll be fine.” It isn’t necessarily easy to find a theme in Kansas’ series of near-disasters in March. But it was easy to figure out their unified front Sunday.
“I think we have to do what we have been doing to get us here,” senior point guard Tyshawn Taylor says. “We have to defend. We have to be tough. Rebound the ball. Get good shots. Take care of the ball. Limit their transition. Just do what we’ve been doing to get us to this point and . . . “We’ll be fine.” Why wouldn’t they think that after surviving to the last day of the season?
This is a team that lost four starters from last year and didn’t have many admirers at various points this season.
After a six-point loss to Davidson on Dec. 19, that included Jayhawks coach Bill Self.
“I was a little frustrated, because I thought we were underachieving, underperforming,” Self says. “I thought we were a stale team. I thought we were slow. I thought we didn’t play with great energy. I thought the things we had to do to be successful we weren’t committed to doing them. I thought we were a little full of ourselves.”
Self’s little tirade lit a fire, and Kansas began to find an identity: Defend and rebound and be tough, and you can be really good. Take anything for granted, take a half off, and you won’t be.
After the Davidson loss, Kansas won 10 in a row and lost three times the rest of the way.
That’s when the real fun began, and Kansas, a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament, began to form another identity: survivor.
In the tournament’s round of 32, Kansas trailed No. 10 seed Purdue nearly the entire game but clawed out a 63-60 victory. In the Sweet 16, the Jayhawks missed 13 of 14 three-point attempts and struggled to a 60-57 victory against No. 11 seed North Carolina State. In the Midwest Regional final, Kansas pulled away late for a double-digit win against top seed North Carolina.
The Jayhawks found themselves trailing Ohio State by nine at halftime Saturday. Then they did what they do. They made more key plays down the stretch to win 64-62. But more than that, they made a lot of grinding plays in the last 20 minutes.
The Jayhawks have become so accustomed to surviving that they seem to anticipate they will be faced with some sort of potential calamity and already know how they will get past it. And that can be a kind of fun in itself. “I’m really enjoying it,” Self says of the tournament run. “The guys somehow find a way. They’re finding a way on the biggest stage.
“It’s remarkable to me to see how much these guys have matured, grown, trust each other. It’s been a blast to watch from the sidelines.”
Kansas has seemed to abandon the hope its effort will be consistently efficient and well-organized or maybe even pretty.
“If you look at our schedule and you circled all of the crazy games we’ve had, I think we’d have more circled than a lot of teams across the country,” junior guard Elijah Johnson says. “I think that’s what got us here.” Just claw and survive. That will do. There is a certain part of all this madness that the Kansas players embrace.
OK, call us underdogs — more heart and toughness and survival instinct than talent — who just want to trash the game, hang around and have a shot with five minutes left.
OK, so we’re college basketball’s cockroaches. You can stomp on us, but you can’t kill us.
But on the eve of the title game, that perception has begun to bug Kansas’ best player.
“I find that annoying,” says junior forward Thomas Robinson, the Jayhawks’ leading scorer and rebounder. “I feel like people are saying we got lucky to be here.”