MADISON, WIS. ? Roy Williams does not take many chances.

Ten points, a dozen, then 15 – go ahead, try to come up with a lead big enough to keep Williams nailed to his seat. A deep and talented Kansas basketball team tried its best game after game and what it finally learned was this: You can’t.

Midway through the second half Sunday against Oregon, Williams’ Jayhawks were rolling as only they can. They were sweeping the glass, spreading the defense, scoring off the break and inside the lane, wearing down the Ducks the way they had 32 other opponents this season.

But then in just 76 seconds, three turnovers reduced a 14-point Kansas lead to six and turned Williams into a sideline lunatic. As Oregon’s Freddy Jones raced up the court on a breakaway dunk, Williams flew off the bench and threw his arms wildly behind him, the better to shed his suit jacket and fire it into the stands.

A moment later, though, thinking better of it, Williams simply pushed over the chair he’d just vacated. The moment after that, suddenly calm, he called a 30-second timeout.

“As a coach, you can’t do a lot to show frustration. You can’t run out there and strangle somebody,” Williams said.

And then he laughed.

Kansas had won 104-86 to advance to the Final Four for the third time in Williams’ 14 seasons at the school.

“It must have looked silly,” he said, scanning the room for confirmation.

There was enough to make him blush.

“I’m sure,” he said finally, “it looked silly.”

Compared with some of the other motivational stunts he’s pulled over the years, that little fit of pique was nothing.

To change his luck in NCAA tournaments past, Williams has, at various times, stopped the team bus so he could spit in the Mississippi River; patted the gravestone of Dr. James Naismith, Kansas’ first coach and the man credited with inventing basketball; and brought a stuffed monkey to meetings for his players to pummel.

Those tactics have yielded plenty of success, but not the national championship that Williams’ toughest critics insist he needs to fill out his resume. Since leaving Dean Smith’s side as an assistant at North Carolina in 1988, Williams has taken Kansas to the tournament in all but his first season and has now reached the Final Four for the third time. But the expectations have been even greater.

“Coach Williams came up to me before the game, and he said, ‘It’s a shame one team has to go home with a rock in its gut,'” Oregon coach Ernie Kent said. “Unfortunately, that team is us.”

After a pause, though, Kent’s expression brightened.

“I hope Kansas wins the tournament,” he added. “For as much criticism as he’s taken, I just don’t understand it.”

Neither does Williams, who played for Smith at North Carolina and suffered almost as much waiting for his mentor to finally win the biggest game of his career. And when Smith finally won the national title in 1982, what stayed with Williams down through the years was something Smith told him that evening: “I’m not really any better coach than I was two hours ago.”

The strange thing is that Williams is now 51, the same age as Smith when he won the championship, and probably improving as a coach in the bargain. This will mark the fifth time he’s gone into the tournament as a No. 1 seed. It will be the first time he’s made the Final Four as a top seed, and the reason is a newfound flexibility.

For most of his stay at Kansas, Williams was something of a control freak, relying on big men and employing structured half-court play where he called the shots on nearly every possession. In the last few years, as most promising big men went straight to the NBA and his college brethren employed smaller, quicker squads to hoist more 3-point shots, it seemed the game might have passed Williams by.

But loyalty, an easy temper and an honest approach to building a program aren’t the only reasons Williams is so admired in the fraternity. He’s a notoriously quick study, and when he studied this edition of the Jayhawks, he came to the conclusion it was better off running and making its own decisions on the fly. The point guard who runs the offense, Aaron Miles, is a freshman, and the kid who made the difference Sunday was another freshman, Keith Langford.

“He’s had so much confidence in this team all year,” Langford said, “and we’ve trusted him back.”

It’s worked in ways the teacher and his students probably never imagined in October, when they got together for the first time.

“Stop giving him heat,” Drew Gooden, the Jayhawks’ All-American forward, told reporters just before leaving his coach’s side.

“We’ve still got a chance to get him the thing he desperately wants,” teammate Jeff Boschee said before he, too, walked out of the room.

As they left, Williams appeared to fight back tears.

“If we win the national championship,” he said, “I won’t love these kids any more than I love them tonight.”