A couple of weeks ago Larry Brown tossed out the term “death march” to describe the approaching portion of the Jayhawks’ basketball schedule.
Everyone knew that string of rugged games would begin with a trip to Kansas State, but no one was quite sure whether it would end at Missouri or at Colorado.
Now we know.
“It’s not over,” Brown stressed. “We’re still traveling. We’ve gotta go to Colorado.”
Tipoff is 8:10 p.m., Lawrence time, Wednesday at the CU Events Center in Boulder. It’ll be telecast live on channels 13 and 41 in the Lawrence area.
Until last week, it was debatable whether Colorado deserved to be included with the likes of Kansas State, Oklahoma, Missouri and Duke on the Kansas “death march.”
But then the downtrodden Buffs slammed Missouri, 87-78, last Wednesday night in Boulder to prove once again they can sneak up on you when you least expect it.
“They played one of the best games I’ve ever seen a team play,” Missouri’s Derrick Chievous said afterward.
Not that the Buffs haven’t proven in the past that they can upset the apple cart when they play in their beloved mountains. Remember last year when the Buffs – yep, they were downtrodden then, too – rose up and smote Kansas, 66-56, in the CU Events Center?
So far it’s been a bittersweet “death march” for the Jayhawks.
They’ve had the satisfaction of posting road wins against their two traditional rivals, Kansas State and Missouri, but they’ve also suffered the agony of an overtime home loss to Duke and a tantalizingly close defeat at Oklahoma.
So Colorado is the rubber game on the hardest portion of the Kansas schedule.
Clearly, the Jayhawks suffered a letdown in Boulder last season. Will the Jayhawks go flat again this time?
“Hopefully, we won’t,” KU standout Danny Manning said on the heels of Saturday’s 82-77 win over Missouri. “Hopefully, we can maintain. It’s a new team, a new look.”
Lately, it hasn’t seemed to matter to Manning whether it’s a new look, an old look or somewhere in between.
Manning has scored 30 or more points in the last three games while making 39 of 66 field goal tries (59.1 percent) and 20 of 23 free throw attempts (87 percent). When Brown said the 6-10 All-American has played the best he’s ever played during the last two weeks, no one dissented.
At the same time, Manning hasn’t been a one-man team.
“(Dick) Vitale said we could win with Danny and four students. That’s not right,” Brown stressed. “We’ve had other people able to help and Danny…just his presence is gonna make everybody better.”
Manning did not play particularly well last year in Boulder when he missed eight of 14 shots and scored 19 points. In fact, Manning is shooting just under 50 percent (21 of 43) in his three previous games at Colorado.
If Kansas wins on Wednesday night, it will clinch the No. 3 seed in the Big Eight Tournament.
Notes
Kansas, ranked No. 4 nationally in field goal percentage defense, has held opponents under 50 percent shooting for 10 consecutive games…For the ninth time in his career, Manning was named Big Eight player of the week on Monday…
