Self just learned "who we are" tonight.
We are the team that likes to have our butts chewed.
We like to bend over bare assed naked in the locker room and have a Stihl string trimmer laceration episode.
We are the team that never meant a coach with a lawn mower it didn't like.
We are the team that walks around junkyards looking for Dobermans to take a bite out of the backs of our pants.
We are THAT team.
Coach Bill Self, who once was a butt chewer par excellence in his 40s, but who seemed after his mid-life crisis to decide to put the string trimmers and lawn mowers away, just dusted a couple off in the Florida game, at half time, after a first half that can only be called Kentucky 2.0.
It was so bad that a die hard "Bill Self is a genius" type like yours truly, went into a kind of post apocalyptic million mile stare and said on JNew's Live Blog that this was going to be a bigger blow out than the Kentucky game.
If Mother "Bate were alive today, and not turning in her grave at my loss of faith in her beloved 'Birds, she would be washing my mouth out with one of those wire brush shotgun barrel scrubbers dipped in nitro solvent and lilac. She was that kind of mother.
Anyway, it was all quite a magnificient turnaround to behold. And Wayne Selden suddenly came out of the offensive stupor he has been mired in since the season began. Just say: Wayne gunned the trey, shot the pull up, took it to the iron, and generally acted like the kind of 2 that could pump life back into a corpse. The speculation would be that fully half of Wayne's ass is some where in shredded pieces on the floor of the KU locker room.
Frank Mason? Frank, after fertilizing everything he touched with some of the foulest compost ever witnessed in the first half, began to sew seeds of moves and dishes and gunning that made one bless the child that finally got his own.
Perry Ellis, after doing the Houdini in the first half, apparently materialized long enough in the locker room to feel his own arse reduced to a bloody pulp and came out and basically played guys a half foot taller even up.
Clifford "The Big Red Dog" looked utterly unfamiliar with the game of basketball the first half, and the came out with half an ass and suddenly seemed to have a Ph.d. in hoops.
Devonte Graham was especially impressive down the stretch handling the ball when Mason tried to play through what appeared an ankle hyper extension of some kind, only to discover that he could run but not well. Devonte did not bother much with clock management down the stretch. One could almost see the swarthy Frank in a big sombrero saying, "Time clock management? We don't need no stinking time clock management!" Rather he seemed to resort to the old adage that if you don't lose it and score a few points along the way that that is as good as playing the clock like an upper classmen would.
And one could go on.
But bottomline, Bill Self, post-male menopausal Bill Self, old post midlife crisis Bill Self, who probably was looking to settle comfortably into his golden coaching years letting his assistants chew butts, suddenly found that he needed a Briggs and Stratton 12 horse at least, and maybe a 15-20 HP, to really awaken the desire to play in his team of sawed off squirts.
It looks like newly chewed butts is "who we are."
