Gary Williams. Head men’s basketball coach at Kansas University.

Roy Williams. Head men’s basketball coach at Maryland University.

Yes, I’ve reversed the names. Gary Williams is head coach at Maryland and Roy Williams is, of course, the Jayhawks’ coach. Still, it might have been the other way around.

Let’s go back to 1988. Two months after Kansas surprised Oklahoma in the NCAA Championship game, Larry Brown opted to return to the NBA to coach the San Antonio Spurs. So KU cranked up the search process.

“As best as I can remember it,” said Bob Frederick, KU’s athletic director at the time, “Larry told me he thought Gary Williams would be a great candidate to replace him, and that he knew he was interested.”

Gary Williams, then coach at Ohio State, had worked with Brown as an aide with a USA Basketball developmental team and Frederick had met Williams when the USA club practiced in Allen Fieldhouse.

First, though, Frederick placed a phone call to Dean Smith, the former KU basketball player who had become a coaching icon at North Carolina.

“I asked him if he’d consider coming back here and he just laughed,” Frederick said. “He said it would be awfully hard since they’d named a building after him.”

Smith asked Frederick if he had anyone in mind. Frederick told him about Gary Williams, and Smith mentioned he had an assistant coach named Roy Williams who was ready to become a head coach after spending 10 seasons on the Carolina staff.

Frederick didn’t stand up and salute, though. He knew an assistant would be a tough sell at one of the nation’s most prestigious basketball schools, and the defending national champions to boot.

So Frederick went after Gary Williams, who had been a winner at American University, Boston College and Ohio State. The Kansas AD and Williams had a clandestine two-hour face-to-face meeting at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.

Williams went back to Columbus, Ohio, mulled it over and then called Frederick and told him he was no longer interested. Those were turbulent times for Williams, now 57. He was going through a divorce, and he had been involved in a DUI incident. At the same, KU was almost certain to go on probation  the NCAA struck a month after Roy Williams was hired  and that may have scared him off.

Anyway, spurned by Gary Williams, Frederick set up an interview with Roy Williams at Atlanta’s airport, flew there and met with the North Carolina aide for a couple of hours.

“In my mind, once I had talked to Roy that was the direction I wanted to go, but I knew there would be a lot of concern about hiring an assistant coach,” Frederick said.

Why was Frederick so impressed with Williams?

“Two things,” Frederick said. “One was I could tell how incredibly organized he was. And the other thing was the tremendous respect he had for the tradition of Kansas basketball.”

Frederick and the search committee also interviewed Charlie Spoonhour, then head coach at Southwest Missouri State and now at Nevada-Las Vegas, but Williams was the choice.

“I didn’t want to hire someone who five years later would be going to another job,” Frederick said. “And (Roy Williams) impressed the committee with the story about having one set of golf clubs and one wife, and it became obvious he was the right choice.”

As it turned out, Gary Williams spent one more year at Ohio State, then left for Maryland, his alma mater, where he has been for the last 13 years. But what if Gary Williams had taken the Kansas job?

If Gary Williams had been the right man at the right time for Kansas and come to Lawrence in 1988, he couldn’t have left for his alma mater a year later. Coaches don’t leave after one season. It isn’t done.

And if Gary Williams had been locked into the Kansas job, who would Maryland have hired as its new coach? With the Terrapins in the same league with North Carolina, isn’t it quite likely Roy Williams would have been one of the candidates? And wouldn’t the Maryland AD have been as impressed with Roy Williams as Frederick was a year earlier?

So for what it’s worth, fate may well have dictated that on Saturday night in Atlanta, Roy Williams would be coaching the school wearing red and Gary Williams the team wearing blue.