SAN ANTONIO — All my life I thought the University of Illinois was located in Champaign-Urbana. Now they say the Big Ten Conference school is located in Urbana-Champaign.
They're still the same sister cities, of course. They've just put a different spin on it. Heck, maybe someday it'll be St. Paul-Minneapolis, Fort Worth-Dallas and Das-Haagen.
KU's Drew Gooden throws down a slam. The Jayhawks held an impromptu dunk exhibition Thursday at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
Further evidence that Urbana-Champaign is a Spin City occurred during a media session with Illinois' basketball players on Thursday at the Alamodome.
Illinois won the Big Ten regular-season championship, but lost in the semifinals of the conference tournament by two points to Indiana yet earned the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Midwest Regional nonetheless.
A No. 1 seed can weigh as heavily on a team as a lead-filled basketball. Kansas, for instance, hasn't reached the NCAA Final Four as a No. 1 seed since 1986, and the Jayhawks have earned four top seeds since.
So how is Illinois coping with the onus of its lofty NCAA status?
"After we got a No. 1 seed," Illinois reserve guard Sean Harrington said, "people said, do we deserve it? That's when we decided to be the hunter instead of the hunted, and that's how we look at it."
Thus it will be the top-seeded Illini hunting No. 4 seed Kansas tonight, even though the Jayhawks are the ones most likely to have a safari mind-set.
Do the Illini deserve to be a No. 1 seed? It doesn't matter. Illinois has taken a shard of doubt and turned it into an incentive. This is a masterful tactic worthy of an ambitious political adviser, yet first-year Illinois coach Bill Self is no Machiavelli. He's just an Okie from Edmond, an Oklahoma City suburb.
At the age of 38, Self has one of the finest basketball teams and finest rugs in America. Self has more hair today than he did 16 years ago when fresh out of Oklahoma State he was a 22-year-old graduate assistant on Larry Brown's Kansas University staff.
"That's when you could have three graduate assistants," Self said, "so my job was minimal at best. We were 35-4 that year, and that was a great staff. We still run some of the same sets Kansas ran in '86, believe it or not."
Self played a role, however small, in what many believe was the best Kansas University basketball team of the 20th Century. How good was that KU edition? So good that every starter and this is almost unbelievable scored at least 30 points in a game at least once during his career.
The '86 Jayhawks had sophomore Danny Manning and seven-footer Greg Dreiling in the double post with sweet-shooting Calvin Thompson and Ron Kellogg on the wings and Cedric Hunter at point guard. If it wasn't the best KU basketball team of the century and I hear you if you're arguing for the '52 NCAA champs of Clyde Lovellette et al. it was surely the best KU team that never won a national championship.
Kansas coach roy williams, right, chats with former UCLA and NBA great Bill Walton.
At the 1986 NCAA Final Four in Reunion Arena in Dallas, Duke dispatched Kansas in the semifinals, 71-67. To this day, Brown would tell you the Jayhawks were jobbed by the officials. Then again, it's the NCAA Tournament and anything can happen. No. 1 seeds do win the NCAA title, but so do No. 4s. Heck, the Jayhawks were a No. 6 seed in 1988 when they astonished the country by running the table.
In other words, this Kansas University team, although seeded No. 4, has as good a chance of celebrating a national title on April 2 in Minneapolis as the other 11 teams remaining after Thursday night's two regional semifinals. And Self knows it.
"We're the one seed," the Illinois coach said, "but I don't think there's a nickel's worth of difference between us and Kansas."
Illinois has a deeper bench than Kansas, but depth doesn't mean that much in the NCAA Tournament because of the interminable promo-laden CBS timeouts. Most people also think Illinois has the edge in the backcourt with Frank Williams and Cory Bradford, but Williams is shooting just 41.4 percent from the floor while Bradford, despite making a three-point goal in an NCAA record 88 straight games, has a .376 field goal percentage. KU's Kirk Hinrich and Jeff Boschee are shooting .496 and .434 respectively.
You'll have to stay up late tonight the game won't end until about 11:30 p.m. to learn if the NCAA seeded Illinois and Kansas correctly, or if there really isn't five cents of difference between the two.
KU's Nick COllison shows off his dunking form.
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