Where in the world was Williams headed in such a hurry?

Come to find out the Kansas University men’s basketball coach wanted to have a chat with the three officials who had worked Saturday’s Kansas-Texas game. He was too late.

By the time Williams had finished with his postgame media session and trundled from one end of Allen Fieldhouse to the other, the trio of officials were probably pulling out onto the Kansas Turnpike, headed for KCI.

“They got out of here in a hurry,” Tony Ice, the man in charge of the officials dressing room at KU home games, told me. “They didn’t even eat anything.”

Thus Williams did not receive a postgame interpretation of why he had been assessed a technical foul with 6:08 remaining. Heck, all he did was fling his suit coat about five or six rows up into the student section down at the other end of the Kansas bench. Where in the rule book does it say you can’t do that?

Apparently it doesn’t, but I have to tell you that if I was one of the three officials who worked Saturday and all three were seasoned veterans I would have rung Williams up, too.

Williams, who has been known to hurl his coat in the past (although with less distance and more accuracy), was enraged because soph forward Drew Gooden had been tooted for three fouls within a 52-second span.

With boos raining all over the floor following the third whistle on Gooden, Williams tossed his threads into the seats. The Kansas coach may have been displaying his displeasure for Gooden’s lack of defensive savvy, but it sure looked to me like he was venting about the officiating.

Regardless, Williams’ theatrics produced the desired effect as the Jayhawks, spurred by the increased fandom decibels, turned a 10-point lead into a 15-point cushion. The stunt worked so well, in fact, that Texas coach Rick Barnes tried his own version a few minutes later.

After Longhorns’ guard Royal Ivey was tooted for a five-second call when it appeared Ivey had actually made moves toward the basket, Barnes doffed his suit coat and swung it two or three times like a windmill parallel to his body.

“I was just having some fun there,” Barnes said, smiling about the incident.

Apparently on this day and with this officiating crew, twirling a suit coat in front of the bench was far less serious than shedding it and playing Frisbee with it. Barnes went un-T’d.

Saturday’s game featured another rare moment.

For the first time since anyone could remember, an opposing player fouled out without the Kansas fans standing and waving the wheat to the strains of”You Should Have Had Your Wheaties.”

Then again, it would have been rather crass to wave the wheat when the fouled-out player was lying motionless under the basket. Texas freshman James Thomas hit the basket support stand after hammering Nick Collison and, after five or six minutes on the floor, had to be assisted to the training room with 4:46 remaining.

That was the fifth foul on Thomas who was able to return to the bench after suffering only minor damage to his neck and back, according to a UT official.

All the fouls 28 on Texas; 18 on Kansas and the Thomas injury not to mention the interminable CBS-TV timeouts conspired to make it a two-hour and 17-minute game.

Nobody asked for their money back. Williams did ask for his suit coat back, though, and it looked to me like it had an extra wrinkle or two in it.