Crack open a Baseball Encyclopedia, find a list of 20-game winners, and you’ll see the names of some short ones, some tall ones, some fat ones, some skinny ones, some left-handers, some right-handers, some level-headed guys, some nut jobs.

For all their differences, they had one thing in common: They all knew how to figure out a way to win on nights they didn’t have their best stuff.

Kansas University’s basketball team hadn’t been very good at doing that this season, as evidenced by losses to unranked Oral Roberts and DePaul.

The Jayhawks, with leading scorer Darrell Arthur watching more than playing Monday night against USC because of foul trouble, had trouble scoring by feeding the post. They couldn’t do any better shooting from the perimeter, with Brandon Rush unable to shake his shooting slump (two for seven on threes) and the three guards combining to go 2-for-11 from beyond the arc.

They weren’t going to win this game on skill, so they relied on strong defensive pressure, relentless board work and the ability to make the important plays at decisive moments. Defeating unranked USC, 72-62, in Allen Fieldhouse in itself was no reason to celebrate into the morning, yet the way they won was encouraging.

“It’s good to win a game when you shoot 38 percent,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “That means you’re doing some other things pretty well.”

It’s good to win when Arthur is limited to 15 minutes, when Rush makes just three of 14 shots, when the team shoots 21 percent from three-point territory. It’s good to win ugly because when March arrives and the shots aren’t falling in a game, the Jayhawks will need memories like this to fall back on to know they can win by making the other guys play even uglier.

Darnell Jackson played like a beast and produced five of the team’s 20 offensive rebounds. Mario Chalmers got his quick hands on so many dribbles and passes he had the biggest hand in the Trojans’ panicking into making 25 turnovers, six on steals by Chalmers. Sherron Collins had been working so hard at trying to turn a weakness – applying pressure defense – into a strength that so much of the rest of his game had gone into hibernation. Harassing ballhandlers is becoming more natural to him, and the other stuff is returning. Rush made sure Nick Young, USC’s leading scorer, didn’t shoot any better than he did. Young scored eight points, less than half his average.

“It was a very physical game,” Chalmers said. “When they hit you, you’ve got to hit back.”

The high school All-Americans hit back, instead of looking to the referees to bail them out. They bumped and ground, and had they done a better job of moving their feet instead of reaching with their hands, they would have been able to keep their best players on the floor more often and kept USC off the foul line, where the Trojans made 17 of 20 shots.

Even defensively, it was far from a perfect performance. From an effort standpoint, though, there was little reason to complain. Does this mean the Jayhawks learned from their loss to DePaul? No. Oral Roberts should have taught everyone that reading too much into one strong effort is foolish. This team still has plenty to prove, still has to grind out more wins without having their best stuff, to convince anyone it will be a 30-game winner. It was one small step, nothing more.