SAN ANTONIO — Kansas coach Bill Self could not disguise his unadulterated relief last week when he was free of accusations he couldn’t make the Final Four after his team edged Davidson in the regional final.
Imagine how he felt when the Jayhawks barely avoided getting him tagged as the coach whose team gave up a 28-point lead in the national semifinals.
Indeed, Kansas survived the ultimate up-and-down game at the Alamodome, ousting North Carolina and ex-Jayhawks coach Roy Williams 84-66 to earn a chance at its first national title since 1988.
Brandon Rush scored 25 points for the Jayhawks (36-3), who will meet Memphis (38-1) in tomorrow’s NCAA tournament final.
“Obviously, I felt great,” Self said after his team dispatched the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed. “Still do. That was an unbelievable performance. There were eight guys that played at a very high level for the first 15 minutes. That was a pleasure for me to watch.”
It was impossible to imagine any drama lingering deep into the second half after Kansas’ initial burst. The Jayhawks made 16 of their first 23 shots (69.6 percent) while smothering the Tar Heels at the other end en route to an improbable 40-12 lead.
But Final Four games have been lost despite big early leads. Just ask Maryland, which saw a 22-point edge erode in the 2001 semifinals against Duke.
So too it nearly was for Kansas, which had its edge whittled down to 17 at halftime. That was not nearly as scary as the Tar Heels’ 14-0 explosion — a series of inside moves, backdoor cuts and perimeter jumpers — that narrowed the turnover-addled Jayhawks’ lead to a mere 54-50.
The Tar Heels (36-3) remained as close as five with less than six minutes left, but sixth man Sherron Collins delivered a 3-pointer from the top of the circle. Rush countered a basket by Wayne Ellington with his own drive to the hoop, then lofted a perfect alley-oop to Darnell Jackson to make it 71-61 as part of a clinching 13-0 run.
“We were definitely still confident,” Rush said. “I knew somebody was going to come up with some big plays.”
Kansas could not win one in four Final Four trips under Williams, who left Lawrence, Kan., after 15 seasons in 2003 to take over at his alma mater. Many Jayhawks fans remain resentful of Williams’ departure, and much was made of his first meeting with the former school for which he still professes great affection.
Williams knew all week he would have one of his two favorite college teams to root for tomorrow night, though the master of homespun phrases could probably use a classic colloquialism to describe the scenario: It’s the wrong doggone one.
It was the second straight year a loaded Tar Heels team fell short of a title it surely had the talent to capture. Last year, UNC lost in the regional final after blowing an 11-point lead in the second half to Georgetown.
Yet early on, the game had the makings of a far more ignominious departure for a program that breezed through the East regional and possessed the national player of the year in Tyler Hansbrough.
The junior was his usual sturdy self — 17 points and nine rebounds — but he received little help early from anyone else as the Tar Heels were buried in the first half. And no one else helped out in the paint, where North Carolina was outscored 50-30 in part because of Kansas freshman Cole Aldrich (eight points, seven rebounds, four blocks).
Both Wayne Ellington (18 points) and Danny Green (15 points) were crucial to the aborted comeback, but neither emerged as factors until late in the first half.
“It’s a little like the story you tell about the engine,” Williams said. “You spend so much getting to the top of the hill, and it couldn’t get over it. I’m so proud of my team. … We had a marvelous, marvelous run, but our dreams are bigger than this and it hurts right now.
“It’s a big-time loss and a big-time bitter feeling for us.”
Rush, though, was always there. The junior, who came back to Kansas after suffering an ACL tear last spring, turned in a superlative performance to lead the Jayhawks. He proved vital on the glass, where his seven rebounds helped assure a 42-33 edge in that category. And he shot 11-for-17, damaging the Tar Heels inside and out.
Most importantly, the Jayhawks survived the Tar Heels’ 38-14 counterpunch in the middle of the game. Instead of attempting to answer the unanswerable — just how do you blow a 28-point lead — Self was afforded the chance to describe the emotions of reaching the title game.
“The pressure is off us big-time,” Rush said. “That [Davidson] game we were uptight and didn’t play our type of game. Today we came out and ran up and down the floor and just played our game.”
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