New Orleans ? Perhaps as difficult as squeezing blood from a turnip or ink from a stone is eliciting a personal pronoun from Kansas All-American Nick Collison.
No one is more aware there is no “I” in team than Collison, thus when he does make a reference to himself, the word “team” almost always will be in the same sentence.
And so it was Saturday night — a Loo-zeana Saturday night that will live in KU basketball fans’ memories for many a Cajun moon — that Collison emphasized just how focused the Jayhawks were at the NCAA Final Four.
“Like I told the team,” Collison said after KU massacred Marquette, 94-61, to reach the championship game, “try not to read any papers, watch SportsCenter, anything like that. All we have to do is focus on who we play.”
I’ll tell you one thing. I’d hate to be a KU basketball player and have Collison catch me even reading the funnies or watching a hockey game on ESPN, much less SportsCenter.
Collison didn’t say, but I’m sure he also admonished his teammates about surfing the Web in search of hyperbole extolling the Jayhawks for their dismantling of the Golden Eagles.
Or as former Lawrence High football coach Bill Freeman once said after the Lions stumbled against a team they were supposed to defeat: “We came out wearing headlines on our helmets.”
No doubt it will be difficult for the Jayhawks to go into an information-less cocoon or turn their hotel into an abbey until Monday night’s title game against beast-from-the-east Syracuse.
If they leave their rooms, fans lingering in the lobby will shower them with verbal bouquets and endanger their focus. But if they stay cooped up in their rooms, they’ll have to watch soap operas and Nickelodeon, read the Gideon bible or study.
Hey, there’s a novel concept. How many times does a college student hit the books to keep his mind off distractions? With the Jayhawks 40 minutes away from making history, maybe this is one of those times.
Saturday night’s humbling of Marquette, a team that had destroyed Kentucky, a No. 1 seed, last weekend in Minneapolis, featured some of the best and worst basketball I’ve ever seen a Kansas team play.
KU scored a so-so 12 points in the first six minutes and a tepid 12 points in the last 12 1/2 minutes, but in between … oh, my, the Jayhawks outscored Marquette, 65-22. Think of it this way: KU built a 43-point lead on the Eagles in a mere 19 minutes.
That’s not possible, is it? Obviously, it is because it happened. During those 19 minutes of hell for Marquette, Kansas looked like it was playing one of those compass point or ampersand schools that often show up in December in Allen Fieldhouse in exchange for a five-figure paycheck and a triple-digit lacing.
Kansas could have reached the century mark easily on Saturday night, but coach Roy Williams removed Kirk Hinrich and Collison with 7 1/2 minutes remaining and player-of-the-game Keith Langford with 6:16 showing.
Speaking of Langford, on what will be forever known in KU basketball lore as the Collison-Hinrich Team, Langford has been a heckuva third wheel, hasn’t he?
Somebody asked Marquette coach Tom Crean about Langford being the Jayhawks’ third scoring option and Crean, obviously not shell-shocked by Saturday’s shellacking, corrected the inquisitor.
“Keith is the second-leading scorer on their team during this tournament,” Crean said.
Indeed he is, and Langford is very close to being the leading scorer. After potting 23 points Saturday night, the sophomore southpaw has 90 points in the Jayhawks’ five NCAA games — only three fewer than Collison.
Yet as everyone knows, Monday night’s championship won’t be about who finishes as the Jayhawks’ leading scorer in the tournament. When you’re this close, you can smell it, and the odor is a lot more pleasant than it was when the Jayhawks began the season by dividing their first six games.
“We’re really a totally different team than we were in November,” Collison said.
That’s the understatement of the season.
