Memphis goes national

SAN ANTONIO — Win or lose tonight’s NCAA tournament title game, the image of Kansas as a national basketball power will remain unchanged.

Phog Allen, Wilt Chamberlain, Danny Manning — none of that will be different at the end of the night.

As for Memphis, well, the Tigers’ rise to elite status this decade would receive the ultimate validation. For coach John Calipari. For a talented roster engaged in an unorthodox style.

“Memphis is not known for anything other than being on ’48 Hours’ or something bad happening,” forward Robert Dozier said. “They want something positive to finally come to the city. I think it’d be a great thing if we could come out and win [tonight].”

Of course, this would have seemed unlikely even four years ago, when the first piece of a possible championship team — bruising forward Joey Dorsey — arrived. Calipari had made Memphis respectable, even relevant, but certainly not a power despite his undeniable showmanship and Father Flanagan tactics.

But since then, plenty has changed.

Some of it, assistant Derek Kellogg insists, was the 2005-06 season, when the Tigers were blessed with guys staying (Rodney Carney), arriving (Shawne Williams) and beginning to develop (Chris Douglas-Roberts) and advanced to the Elite Eight.

Surely, some responsibility should be assigned to the ability to bring in a previously straight-to-the-pros player like point guard Derrick Rose, who was battling an upset stomach yesterday but will play when the Tigers (38-1) meet Kansas (36-3) tonight.

“As soon as they stopped having guys go straight from high school to the draft,” Kellogg said jokingly about what happened to make a national title game push possible.

And no doubt, an assist goes to a different recruiting philosophy, shifting away from a Memphis-centric approach to taking on players from around the country.

The Tigers start players from Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit. Only two Memphis natives are on the roster, well shy of the 50-50 split Calipari once envisioned.

“I just felt if you want to be a national program, you have to recruit nationally,” Calipari said. “You can’t be a regional recruiting team and say we’re going to recruit regionally, but we’re going to be national. Can’t do it.”

Much of the credit, though, must go to the dribble-drive motion, an offense Calipari picked up from former junior college coach Vance Walberg that is perfectly tailored to the set of players Calipari ultimately attracted to Memphis.

The ex-NBA coach found it appealing because of the spacing principles involved. Players love it because anyone on the perimeter can start a play with a drive to the lane. In its purest form, it is both an aesthetically pleasing product and a retort to coaches who try to constrict their players.

“If you don’t have a good feeling for the game and your spacing is off and you don’t have a good basketball IQ, you can’t run this offense,” Douglas-Roberts said.

Calipari described it as “Princeton on steroids,” and while that may convey its appearance, it does not cover its impact — either on the sport this season or on Memphis the last few years.

Traditional powers spent the last few seasons — and, in particular, this weekend — sharing attention with an interloper from the Mid-South. For the Tigers, it has changed the identity of a program with two previous Final Fours (1973 and 1985) into something much larger.

Beefy sophomore Pierre Niles, the lone Memphis native in the locker room this week, said when he was going through high school, no one was thinking about Memphis.

Not too many years later, everything is different.

“This year, there’s nothing you can do and get away with,” Dozier said. “Maybe when I got here, we could do things and people wouldn’t notice much because they didn’t know who we were. Now, everywhere you go, someone knows who you are.”

With a victory tonight — a win that could deliver a sense of permanence for Memphis — they always might.