From The Mag: Kansas is No. 1
KU: 'Why wouldn't we be No. 1?'
Sherron Collins and Cole Aldrich helped Kansas turn things around quickly after the Jayhawks won the 2008 national championship, but they weren't satisfied with the results. Collins and Aldrich hope to become the school's first players to wear two title rings.
By KEN DAVIS
Basketball Times
When the 20-year wait between NCAA championships finally ended for Kansas, it triggered a series of celebrations and parades for the Jayhawks and their fans. What started with confetti and the trimming of the nets inside the Alamodome quickly spilled into the streets of San Antonio. The famous “Rock Chalk Jayhawk” chant echoed throughout the night, originating from bars and restaurants along the Riverwalk before finally quieting a bit just before dawn.
At the downtown Hilton, in a suite reserved for Kansas players and coaches, their families and friends, the party was slightly more intimate – but just as joyous. Amid the hugs and handshakes, everyone watched the highlights and recaptured those glorious final seconds of regulation and overtime again and again.
“Hey, is this not great?” coach Bill Self said to assistant coach Joe Dooley as they both took in the surrounding happiness.
And then Dooley spoke the words Self will never forget.
“Now we’ve got to figure out how to it again,” Dooley said to KU’s head coach.
Self remembers thinking, “Can’t we at least relax for a night?” But he also understood that is the cold reality of coaching, especially at one of the elite programs in the nation.
That was 2008. The memory of that April night in San Antonio, especially the historic 3-point shot by Mario Chalmers that forced overtime and led to a 75-68 victory over Memphis, remains fresh in Lawrence, Kan. But if the prognosticators are correct, the Jayhawks won’t have to wait 20 years to raise another banner in Allen Fieldhouse. Self, his staff and the Kansas players have their sights set on lifting the championship trophy again in 2010.
Basketball Times agrees and has selected Kansas as its preseason No. 1 team for the 2009-10 season, which ends with the Final Four in Indianapolis. Led by two preseason All-America candidates, senior point guard Sherron Collins and junior center Cole Aldrich, the Jayhawks are the prohibitive favorites. Kansas returns its starting five and its top nine scorers from last season’s team that lost to Michigan State in the Sweet 16. And Self has added a cast of talented newcomers, led by Xavier Henry, a 6-foot-6 wingman who should supply the scoring punch that was provided by Brandon Rush in 2008 and was missing last season.
Rush, Chalmers, Darrell Arthur, Darnell Jackson and Sasha Kaun, all key players in that 2008 championship, were selected in the NBA draft that year. Despite the massive reshuffling of personnel, the Jayhawks came close to another Final Four visit last season, finishing 27-8 overall and winning the Big 12 with a 14-2 record.
As soon as Aldrich and Collins announced their decisions to return for this season, the expectations became clear. Those two holdovers from 2008 could become the first Jayhawks in the history of the storied program to win two NCAA rings.
“(The hunger) never waned at all,” Collins said. “I’m hungry. We’re all hungry. We fell short last year, but I don’t think it was a failure. We finished higher than most people thought we would, but it’s something we weren’t pleased with. (Winning two rings) has given us a lot of motivation, to be one of those special groups. Florida won two. Hopefully, we can win two. What a way to end it, in my senior year. It’s always in the back of my head. How could you not think about it?”
Self knows better than anyone the amount of talent he has congregated in Lawrence. He sees the inside-outside combination of Aldrich and Collins. He sees the deep roster, with competition for the other three starting spots. He doesn’t shy away from the No. 1 preseason tag, but he isn’t ready to automatically crown his Jayhawks either.
“I don’t think you put limits on what’s possible,” Self said. “We’re still a pretty young team. I’m real proud of that, I’m real proud that we can have so much change over and still yet not lose a lot of ground. I think we do have potential but we’re a long ways away from being good enough to win a national championship – or even compete for it.
“That team that we had two years ago would knock this team out right now as we speak. At the same stage, in early October, that team would be quite a bit better than this team. We have to understand that and know that. But I do think there’s potential on this team. We are deep and we do have a lot of nice pieces. It’s just that we have some unproven pieces that really need to come though in a big way.”
Florida won back-to-back titles, essentially with the same group of players, in 2006 and 2007. Coach Roy Williams, who left Kansas after losing the 2003 championship to Syracuse, led North Carolina to the NCAA title in 2005 and 2009. That doesn’t mean it is easy to bounce back the way Kansas has since 2008.
Recruiting, obviously, is a critical ingredient. And Self thought his staff dropped the ball a bit in that regard.
“Initially, I thought we did a poor job, from a recruiting standpoint, of not taking full advantage of winning it all,” Self said. “There were so many things going on that (recruits) probably didn’t get the full attention they would have gotten if there was nothing going on.
“There were too many people patting us on the back. I’m not that popular a guy, but I think I had one night in May (2008) that I wasn’t speaking somewhere. You have a different platform. You want to do things with raising money for (charities), and they’re all worthwhile. I’m not saying we did a bad job. I just don’t think we hit it quite like we could have.”
Self thinks Kansas caught a few breaks. The coaching staff scrambled and got guard Tyshawn Taylor, from St. Anthony’s in Jersey City, N.J., late in the recruiting process. As a freshman last season, Taylor emerged as KU’s third scoring option and averaged 9.7 points. He followed that up with a solid performance with Team USA’s Under-19 team this summer. The team, coached by Pittsburgh’s Jamie Dixon, brought home the gold medal, and Taylor says the experience was a confidence builder.
Then this past spring, Kansas landed Henry and his brother, C.J., after John Calipari left Memphis for Kentucky. C.J. Henry, a 6-foot-4 guard, originally committed to Kansas in 2005 but was drafted by the New York Yankees. He never advanced past the low minors and went to Memphis as a walk-on. Xavier Henry, rated as high as No. 3 among the nation’s seniors, decided last November to join his brother. But the departure of Calipari – and the decisions of Aldrich and Collins to stay at Kansas – changed the plans of both Henrys.
“They said they had a chance to win a title,” said Xavier Henry, son of former Kansas star Carl Henry. “So I said I might as well join them. I’m just going to come in here and help any way I can. If they need a scorer or they need somebody to play defense, I’m just going to do whatever I can, the best I can. Whatever they need and whatever I need to do to stay on the court.
“I just like to score. It doesn’t matter if I’m getting garbage buckets or if I’m getting highlight plays. As long as I’m scoring, it’s a good day. I’m bigger than most two guards, so I can post up real easily or I can drive by easily. Or I can just shoot over the top. I just take what comes to me, and everything seems to work out.”
Henry is good enough to become the first one-and-done player in Kansas history. But before he heads to the NBA, he seems determined to spread the word about his school’s history and tradition.
Asked to explain how the Jayhawks could lose so many stars, yet quickly rebound to be preseason favorites, Henry said, “It’s just the fact that we have people who always work hard. If you work hard, it will beat out talent any day. As long as we have a great coaching staff and a great surrounding cast, they should be able to rebuild every year and do all that. I see KU as a great spot for anybody who wants to win. They just work so hard.”
It is possible Henry will find himself in the starting lineup for the first game. A series of embarrassing incidents in late September and early October damaged the program’s image and also had an impact on the roster. Guard Brady Morningstar, a junior who averaged 6.5 points, was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving in early October and Self suspended him for the first semester.
Morningstar’s arrest came after three bizarre cases of conflict and fighting between members of the basketball team and players from KU’s nationally ranked football team. Taylor suffered a dislocated left thumb in one of those fights, but the injury did not keep him from participating in most drills by the start of practice.
With Morningstar out of games until after the first semester, the door is open for Xavier Henry to join Collins and Taylor in the three-guard attack.
“I haven’t even thought about who’s starting,” Self said. “We’re going to play three perimeter players. All I care about is that one of them is big enough to defend the three and one of them can be a point guard. I felt Xavier would be part of the equation the entire time. But this definitely opens the door for some guys to get experience early.”
Self was disappointed and hurt by the two-week span of bad publicity and bad behavior. He has tried to put a positive spin on the story, saying that bad decisions were made and he expects his players to be more responsible off the court now.
“I thought we had (the right character), but obviously we didn’t,” Self said. “I told the guys, ‘We spent a lot of time, years, everybody in our program, trying to obtain a certain image.’ I tell them all the time it takes a lot longer to climb the mountain than it does to fall from it. From an image standpoint, we’ve certainly fallen a distance.”
Self said he was especially annoyed by a Twitter update, posted on the account of Kentucky football coach Rich Brooks, that read: “Had a call from Coach Cal (Calipari) and he is glad that our players are not fighting like some other big school. Our guys are all in this together.”
Said Self: “I’m only an expert on our program; I’m not an expert on anybody else’s. I’m not saying our guys were right. We put ourselves in a bad position with the football players. There’s no doubt about that. But for somebody else to comment on it from the outside, in this business, that’s almost laughable. But people do that. For me personally, I would never be an expert on what’s going on in somebody else’s program, because it’s not always the way it appears. All coaches know that.”
Are the recent troubles the price a program pays for recruiting to win a national championship? Self doesn’t think so. It remains to be seen what impact the off-the-court problems will have on KU’s season, but Self thinks it already has made the Jayhawks a tighter unit.
From a coaching standpoint, the other big challenge for Self will be stroking egos and keeping everyone happy with playing time. After a likely starting lineup of Collins, Taylor, Xavier Henry, Marcus Morris and Aldrich, the talented reserves will include Mario Little, Markieff Morris, Tyrel Reed, Travis Releford, and Morningstar – all back from last year. Newcomers Thomas Robinson, Elijah Johnson and transfer Jeff Withey (eligible after the first semester) will all demand playing time as well.
Collins and Aldrich know they won’t have to shoulder the load they did last season. But they are the only two who understand how much work – and luck – goes into winning a national championship.
“We both knew that we wanted to stick with each other,” Aldrich said of Collins. “We’re pretty good friends, and we thought if we stayed around one more year, we could get that much better as players. With everybody coming back, we knew we could have a pretty good team. I’m having a blast. I don’t think there’s any better place to play college basketball than here.”
Evidently, it’s fun to be a Jayhawk even if you have to start planning the next championship just minutes after winning one.
Do the Jayhawks understand why they are the consensus No. 1 pick this preseason?
“Umm, yeah,” Taylor said. “We are a team with a lot of confidence, but we’re still hungry at the same time. With that combination, it’s going to be hard to beat us. We’ve got a Sweet 16 team back with the same exact guys. We didn’t lose one piece, plus we gained.
“Why wouldn’t we be No. 1?”
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