Baseball’s Casey Stengel once asked his faltering Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” With crucial Jan. 7 and 10 challenges on the table, Kansas basketball coach Bill Self has to be thinking that way about his erratic Jayhawks.
For all its size, depth, talent and promise, the current KU team has nobody the caliber of do-everything Danny Manning who engineered the surge to the 1988 NCAA title. There’s no defender with the defensive consistency and mentality of Chris Piper.
Name three other guys who will give this 2007 team the periodic excellence that Milt Newton, Kevin Pritchard and Jeff Gueldner added to the mix of Danny and the Miracles? What ’07 guys will join the chorus line and deliver some Rockette-style high kicks a la Scooter Barry, Keith Harris, Lincoln Minor, Otis Livingston, Mike Maddox, Clint Normore and Archie Marshall before he was hurt?
That Larry Brown outfit lost 11 games and had a shaky 21-11 mark before swinging a 6-0 tournament wallop. Kansas State had whipped Kansas in the title game of the Big Eight tournament.
But the guidance of seniors Manning and Piper down the stretch was something today’s Kansas team hasn’t come close to approximating. These guys can do scintillating things, but they have not shown they can dominate the Big 12, then bag at least two victories in the NCAAs. Final Four? It takes a crimson-blue hemophiliac to think that right now.
They’re young (no seniors) and need time to coagulate. It wasn’t until the fourth year, ’52, that the Clyde Lovellette-Bill Lienhard-Bill Hougland-Bob Kenney nucleus grabbed ultimate NCAA and Olympic glory.
But somebody, I say somebody (remember Sen. Claghorn?), must assert the kind of leadership Manning and Piper did with the determined Gueldner, Pritchard and Newton as spear-carriers. Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich could back people against the wall and demand that they play harder and better. Jo Jo White would grab somebody by the throat and get results.
Yet for all their skills, physical and mental, that latter trio never won the big one.
So will the Jayhawks 2007 keep sputtering along and fall short, as have so many other promising KU teams? Could happen.
There can be no Manning reincarnation between now and March. Until there is a collective explosion of focus and skill, there is no evidence of any emergence of four Miracles.
Sunday at South Carolina and Wednesday here against Oklahoma State will tell us a huge amount about KU. Carolina has injury problems, but the game is on the road; another DePaul disaster could result. Leadership? JamesOn Curry is a proven force that could drive Oklahoma State past the Jayhawks. Where’s KU’s counterpart for Curry?
The KU schedule provides images of Jayhawks groping to negotiate those hostile forests from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. If KU can handle South Carolina and Okie State, it gets no respite because of a trek to Iowa State, where Kansas often has been waylaid. Surprising Missouri, wheeling, dealing and conquering, swoops in on Jan. 15, then comes a Jan. 20 visit to Bob Knight’s Texas Tech mausoleum. Kansas could go to Baylor on Jan. 24 with anything from a 4-0 to a 1-3 record.
But forget 4-0 until some kind of leadership prevents KU playing down to the level of competition rather than measuring up to it.
