On Selection Sunday, Oregon guard Frederick Jones took one look at the NCAA tournament brackets and smiled.
Kansas was the No. 1 seed in the Midwest Regional. Oregon was No. 2. If the seeds held …
The next day Jones called longtime friend Drew Gooden, the Jayhawks’ All-America forward.
“I talked to Drew the day after the brackets came out and we were saying how great a game this was going to be,” Jones said Saturday.
Two weeks later their dream matchup has become a reality. In what promises to be one of the tournament’s more entertaining games, the top-seeded Jayhawks and second-seeded Ducks will meet Sunday at the Kohl Center for a trip to the Final Four.
“We’re both at our best in an up-and-down game,” Gooden said. “It’s going to be a track meet.”
The track meet will take place in a building associated with tractor pulls. The Kohl Center became known as the temple of Neanderthal basketball when Dick Bennett coached Wisconsin to the 2000 Final Four. There are questions about whether the Kohl Center scoreboard has triple digits.
Both teams were among the national scoring leaders–Kansas averaged 91.2 points per game this season, the Ducks 85.9. But at first glance, Kansas and Oregon seem to have little in common.
Kansas is synonymous with big-time college buckets. The game’s inventor, James Naismith, was the Jayhawks’ first coach. He’s buried not far from Allen Fieldhouse, one of the game’s storied venues.
Oregon is known mostly for rain. And football: The mighty Ducks have become a national power.
Oregon has a respectable basketball tradition; the Ducks won the first NCAA title, in Evanston’s Patten Gym in 1939, and they claimed the rugged Pac-10’s regular-season title by two games this year. But word apparently hasn’t spread beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Jones was watching an ESPN talk show the other day when one of the hosts began talking about Oregon’s Midwest semifinal matchup with Texas.
“The man says, `I don’t know anything about Oregon or Texas,'” Jones recalled. “We’re in the Elite Eight and people still don’t know anything about us.”
That will change if the Ducks beat Kansas on Sunday.
Coach Ernie Kent, working his fifth season at his alma mater, has assembled a quick, athletic team. One indication of his team’s talent level came when Kent tried to recruit Aaron Miles, a fleet point guard from Portland.
Miles thought hard about staying close to home. But he looked at the Ducks’ roster and knew he’d probably sit behind Oregon’s Luke Ridnour, now a sophomore.
Miles wanted to play right away, so he went to Kansas, where he has become a critical part of Roy Williams’ arsenal.
How critical? Without Miles the Jayhawks may have been back in Lawrence on Saturday instead of preparing for the regional final.
Miles shot 5-for-11 from the floor, scored 13 points, pulled down seven rebounds and had five assists in the Jayhawks’ 73-69 victory over Illinois in the Midwest semifinal Friday night. On a night when stars Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison were in foul trouble, KU’s three freshmen–Miles, guard Keith Langford and forward Wayne Simien–scored 35 of KU’s 73 points.
The Jayhawks couldn’t exhale until the Fighting Illini missed two wide-open shots in the final minutes.
“We felt fortunate,” Williams said.
Oregon survived a similar scare in the other regional semifinal. The Ducks defeated sixth-seeded Texas 72-70, but the victory wasn’t secure until Longhorns freshman T.J. Ford’s runner bounced off the rim at the buzzer.
Oregon overcame a poor outing by Jones, who scored only four points, although he did convert a driving layup into the winning bucket with 2.8 seconds remaining.
If either the Illini or the Longhorns had made their last-second shots, Sunday’s final might have had a different look. Thus the Midwest bracket has broken exactly the way Jones and Gooden hoped.
“We’re not going to back down,” Jones said, “And neither are they.”
Midwest Regional
Kansas (32-3) vs. Oregon (26-8)
When: 1:30 p.m. Sunday; WBBM-Ch. 2.
How they got here: Kansas held off Holy Cross, destroyed Stanford and escaped Illinois to reach the Elite Eight. Oregon, after an easy win over Montana, had to battle past Wake Forest and Texas.
Outlook: Kansas forward Drew Gooden should have a big day against a Ducks front line that doesn’t always play good defense. This will be a high-tempo, run-and-gun game, and Gooden may be the best big man in the nation when it comes to getting up and down the court. Oregon power forward Robert Johnson needs to stay out of foul trouble and play strong defense, since 7-foot-2-inch, 305-pound Chris Cristoffersen is a step slow. Kansas appears too physical for the Ducks. But given Oregon’s bombs-away mentality (a sterling 43.5 percent from three-point range), this should be close throughout and an upset wouldn’t be a big surprise.
