A quick count of the men’s basketball championship banners in Pauley Pavilion by anyone with an SAT score higher than Derrick Rose’s will result in a tally of 11.
I demand an asterisk there.
A brief check of the archives and the history books will show that the last time UCLA and Kansas met was in the Elite Eight on March 24, 2007.
Well, I demand an asterisk there, too.
Kansas basketball is the best thing to come out of that state since Dorothy and Toto, and its showdown with UCLA on Sunday has the potential to be a much more titillating rematch, if a little revisionist history can be taken into account.
Unless your list of spring allergies includes every known sports media outlet, you probably heard that the 2007-2008 Memphis basketball team was forced to forfeit its 38 wins and national runner-up status after it was discovered that their star point guard Rose should have been ineligible based on a number of violations, including a falsified SAT score.
Here is where UCLA and Kansas come in. In 2008, the Bruin team, led by Kevin Love, made it to its third straight Final Four before succumbing to a Memphis team that was clearly superior. But with Memphis’ season entirely voided by the NCAA, that sets the stage for one of those what-could-have-been moments in sports: a championship showdown between UCLA and Kansas, an epic contest rife with story lines in which I believe the Bruins would have won.
The match-ups favored UCLA all over the board. In beating Memphis in the championship game, Kansas took advantage of an abysmal Memphis frontcourt that managed only 17 points (which is what Kevin Love averaged himself that season) and whose biggest player, Joey Dorsey, fouled out in the second half (something Love never did).
Kansas also forced Memphis to make free throws down the stretch, a strategy that worked beautifully as the Tigers choked miserably and allowed the Jayhawks to come back and force overtime. This came as no surprise: The Tigers shot just 61 percent from the charity stripe for the year. Meanwhile, the Bruins shot more than 73 percent on the season.
What does this all add up to? A juicy scenario that would have made this rivalry between college hoops titans in UCLA and Kansas even bigger. The Bruins and Jayhawks have won 14 combined national championships and boast some of the game’s most iconic figures (see: Wooden, John and Allen, Phog), yet have never met in the title game.
In a sport sustained by tradition, this is a match-up that has been missing.
The ties between the two programs run fairly deep: The legendary Larry Brown coached at both institutions (though that’s not saying much), while brothers JaRon and Brandon Rush split their household and headed in opposite directions to play in Westwood and Lawrence, Kansas, respectively.
As an embittered fan of UCLA basketball still living in the past, particularly in light of the struggles of this year’s squad, I would still love to see this rematch happen.
Recently, Gatorade took the lead in setting up the replay of a game between a pair of high school football teams that played to a tie in 1993, but were left frustrated over the sister-kissing result.
I’m holding out hope for a similar action here: Gather 2007-2008 starters Russell Robinson, Mario Chalmers, Brandon Rush, Darrell Arthur and Darnell Jackson for Kansas, and Darren Collison, Russell Westbrook, Josh Shipp, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Love for UCLA and throw them on a court. Given the recent success of these former Bruins in the NBA, my money (if I were into that kind of thing) would be on UCLA.
This revisionist match-up would be a dream. Even if I have to go to the land of Oz to make it come true.
If you think a Gatorade-sponsored match-up between UCLA and Kansas would be G, e-mail Eshoff at reshoff@media.ucla.edu.