KU will try to finish for itself and for the Big 12
SAN ANTONIO | As if a team playing for the national title needs any more weight on its shoulders, Kansas meets Memphis tonight for its program’s reputation and history, and for a conference that’s been waiting since its inception to plant a championship flag.
But the burden is mostly the Jayhawks’ fault, because they’ve become a victim of their greatness.
In hoop parlance, Kansas has had trouble finishing. If the Tigers win, the Jayhawks will tie Duke for the most second-place finishes in NCAA Tournament history with six.
Kansas has been an exemplary program in many ways except one. It doesn’t often get to the final awards podium, at least not enough for a team that likes to consider itself among the game’s elite.
Conference titles, league tournament trophies, All-America players, all-time victories, in all other measures, Kansas stands with the best.
But the Jayhawks have won as many national championships in the tournament’s 70 years as Florida in the last two, as many as North Carolina State and San Francisco in their histories. That’s fewer than UCLA (11), Kentucky (seven), Indiana (five), North Carolina (four) and Duke (three), the programs with which the Jayhawks are most closely associated.
Unfair as it is for Brandon Rush, Mario Chalmers, Darrell Arthur and company, they’re playing for something bigger than a party in Memorial Stadium.
They’re trying to go where all the Kansas greats couldn’t in the last 20 years. They’ve been close since the miracle run of 1988, with four Final Fours and two trips to the national championship game in that span. But others got to hang the banner.
“They get the same stuff you heard about Dean Smith at North Carolina or Mack Brown at Texas,” Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe said. “Until they win the big one, it becomes an unfortunate rap and not right for an individual, a school or a conference.”
Bill Self acknowledged the Big 12 has much to gain from a Jayhawks’ victory.
“I think nationally in order to really garner the respect that a league deserves, you’ve got to cut down the nets,” Self said.
Tournament basketball got off to a terrible start for the Big 12, launched in 1996. There were no Final Four teams for the first five years despite monster teams like Kansas with Raef LaFrentz/Paul Pierce and Iowa State with Marcus Fizer and Jamaal Tinsley falling short.
The breakthrough came in 2002, and over a three-year period, the Big 12 advanced five teams to the final weekend, with the Jayhawks losing to Syracuse for the 2003 championship.
“We had those possibilities but couldn’t cash in,” Beebe said. “If you keep knocking on the door, it’s going to happen.”
Since that 2002 season, no conference placed more teams in the Final Four than the Big 12’s six. But since the formation of the league, every major conference has won a national championship.
Every year, their coaches defend the Big 12 and often suggest the conference is underrated nationally, especially compared with the attention directed toward the ACC. Saturday’s Kansas victory over North Carolina had to give Big 12 reps a healthy dose of smugness.
And the conference has helped where it could. Television contracts are solid, and the Big 12 covets its Big Monday slot. The conference even answered the coaches’ request to move the conference tournament so it ends on a Saturday, beginning in 2009, to give the selection committee additional time to weigh the merits of its champion.
Then there’s also this for Kansas: In the Big 12 era, most schools with historically powerful programs have won a national championship. Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska have taken football titles. The Longhorns have won baseball, Oklahoma State wrestling and golf, the Cornhuskers volleyball.
No school is more closely associated with a sport’s greatness than Kansas with basketball. Winning tonight tightens that grip and gives the Big 12 bragging rights it’s never had this time of year.
To reach Blair Kerkhoff, college sports reporter for The Star, call 816-234-4730 or send e-mail to bkerkhoff@kcstar.com
