And now, please welcome the disrespected, disregarded, free-throw clanging 37-1 Memphis Tigers.
They were the No. 1-seeded team that hardly anyone seemed to think would get to the Final Four, but they are headed for a date with UCLA on Saturday in San Antonio after a dominating 85-67 victory over Texas on Sunday in the NCAA South regional final.
The Tigers even made their free throws, sinking 30 of 36.
That’s 83.3 percent by a team that was shooting 59.8 percent.
“Every time we huddle up at the line, we say, ‘They don’t think we can make them,'” guard Chris Douglas-Roberts said. “But we’re making them. We’re making them now. So we’ll see what the next knock is.”
Don’t worry, coach John Calipari will find something.
He is playing the no-respect card hard, quite a trick when the Tigers were the No. 2-ranked team in the final Associated Press poll and lost only once, a four-point setback to then-No. 2 Tennessee.
But he is right about this: In a year when the four top-seeded teams all made it to the Final Four for the first time since the NCAA began seeding the field in 1979, Memphis was considered the flawed team.
If it wasn’t free-throw trouble that would do in the Tigers, it was supposed to be their dearth of offensively skilled players, or their relatively unchallenged tour through Conference USA.
“It just adds fuel to the fire,” said Joey Dorsey, the 6-foot-9-inch, 265-pound senior whose job it will be to try to fend off UCLA’s Kevin Love. “It’s just another thing we put on our back, with the free throws and hearing that we can’t do it because we’re in a small conference. So we just go out there and try to prove everyone wrong.”
That’s easier to do with a player as good as Derrick Rose, the broad-shouldered freshman point guard who led the way for the Tigers with an astonishingly complete game, thoroughly outplaying Texas point guard D.J. Augustin.
Rose, 6-3 and 205 pounds from Simeon High in Chicago, scored 21 and handed out nine assists while grabbing six rebounds. He made 7 of 10 shots, blocked a shot, made a steal — and in 34 minutes with the ball mostly in his hands, committed only two turnovers.
“I’m just living the dream right now,” Rose said. “Everybody back home is happy for me and our fans back in Memphis are happy, so we’re just living it up.”
“He’s a great player,” said Augustin, a 6-foot, 180-pound sophomore who scored 16 points on 4-for-18 shooting and had three assists. “He makes great decisions. He controls the ball. He controls the game, and he controls his team.”
Douglas-Roberts led Memphis with 25 points, and Dorsey had 11 points and 12 rebounds.
The Tigers love to lob the ball to Dorsey for momentum-building dunks, but they thrive with defense.
“I don’t think we’ve seen as good a defense all year as what we saw today,” said Texas coach Rick Barnes, whose team’s victims included UCLA and Kansas.
Against Memphis, the Longhorns — a 45 percent shooting team this season — shot only 36.2 percent.
“Little ol’ Memphis,” Douglas-Roberts said, liking the idea when someone noted the other teams in the Final Four could be UCLA, North Carolina and Kansas, which is the case. “That’s what it is, we’re little ol’ Memphis against those prestigious programs.
“We’ll see what’s going to happen.”
