First comment on the game thread "We Good". I think most of us were in agreement. But we still had some tense moments.
1st tense moment. 5-0 deficit. Was a little surprised Bill didn't use one of his TO's there. He likes to do that sometimes which irks me a bit, but today, he had a confident look on his face. So we outscored them by 8 from that early flurry.
2nd tense moment. After a foul free first ten minutes, the refs at Scotts suggestion started calling fouls on us. Suddenly at the 10:09 Big Dave gets whistled, and Marcus, and then again seemingly for everyone except, most importantly Doke. What irked us was Baylor's aggressive D seemed to be fouling us at an equal rate, without the whistles. Home court advantage. But even as the fouls mounted, we just kept adding to the lead a little at a time.
3rd tense moment. Dotson and Garrett return with 2 fouls in the first half. I think Bill really wanted to walk off the court at the half ahead. Big decision. Baylor weak 1st half FT shooting helped. Our superb FT shooting in the 1st half was keeping us in it, we were perfect in fact, Doke making 1-1.
Of course we frittered away the lead as the D had to be careful not to saddle guys with the 3rd foul. Doke was doing his think like almost never before. I'm thinking this was his best game as a Jayhawk, but I may be wrong.
4th tense moment. Each little run cutting into the lead but the pick and roll offense was working superbly. It helped early in the half that the officials were calling fouls.....on them. But each run of there's was countered by our superb defense. They tied us at 18 apiece with 9 minutes left in the half. They never tied it again.
5th tense moment. The end. As we built the lead we figured a comeback was coming. Unfortunately we allowed it to happen. Garrett (I think) gets tied up (actually he got fouled) and could have used the TO, but decided not to. One of the two sketchy inbounds plays could have been saved by a TO also. Not sure if Self doesn't like our guys using them but I sure wish they had.
6th tense moment. Moss tries to take on several Baylor defenders on a fast break and misses when we could have run a little clock. In fact that miss was one of many in the last 5 minutes. One reason we were holding our collective breaths at the end was because after Dotson made a layup at the 5:27 mark, we only had one more FG, the Doke put back that wasn't dunked.
7th tense moment, and this is on Scott Drew. Hack a Doke maybe wins that game for Baylor. Thanks Scott. I kept waiting for it, and of course ultimately we won the game at the line which is a nice thing to write.
So there you have it. We won, it was actually beautiful. Ultimately it's really a insignificant game big picture wise. We'll move up a place or two, but with a 1 point loss, Baylor won't be punished much. Both of our teams are currently almost locked in for the top seed. I'm excited as the midwest regional is in Indy, just down the road from Chicago, might be able to catch a regional final, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Looking to the future, we get DeSousa back in a week. Not sure it will help us any, but it's certainly another big on the bench and he might have found a little PT today. Maybe he saves Big Dave who the officials had a vendetta against.
So we saw what our team can do, at full strength, as most of us wanted to see. These are special times for us fans of the greatest program in the country. Let's keep this going.
