Kansas defeats Tech! #thelinetoninestartshere

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Kansas coach Bill Self faced his team, carrying with him a long list of toxic stats. It was halftime here on Saturday, down inside the bowels of United Spirit Arena, and Self began to recite the numbers.

Texas Tech had grabbed seven offensive rebounds during a muddy first half. The Jayhawks had only pulled down five defensive boards. Even worse: KU had recorded just five field goals and two assists during the opening 20 minutes. By the sounds of it, Self’s halftime message wasn’t filled with outsized anger or over-the-top theatrics.

“I’ve seen him way worse,” senior center Jeff Withey would say.

It was simply a cutting review of Kansas’ performance.

“That’s as miserable as an offensive team can play,” Self would say after the game.

There are those that will tell you that a Big 12 road win, regardless of the circumstances, is always something to be proud of. Well, Kansas’ 60-46 victory over Texas Tech on Saturday afternoon stretched the limits of that theory to the absolute max.

…All first half, Texas Tech had blanketed Withey inside, leaving Young mostly unguarded. Young didn’t take advantage, Self said, and the KU offense suffered. In the opening minutes of the second half, Young was ready to take advantage, dropping in six points during KU’s game-changing run. The burst included a two-handed reverse slam in transition that brought some life to a staid and half-filled arena.

“Kevin drives me nuts,” Self said. “He drives me nuts, because he can play so good. And at 6-foot-8, he can run and jump and not even contest a shot on a layup … or not even come close to blocking out a guy when his man’s the best offensive rebounder.

“He can do those things, and then when he turns the switch, he does those things great plus a lot more great things.”
KC Star


A strange sequence of events in the first half cost Kansas a possession at the start of the second half, leaving KU coach Bill Self a little heated during a dispute at halftime.

Here’s how it happened: With 8:11 left in the first half, there was a jump ball and Texas Tech was awarded possession, based on the possession arrow. As the Red Raiders took the ball out, Texas Tech’s Jaye Crockett was called for a dead-ball foul. KU took possession, but since no time had run off the clock, the possession arrow stayed with Texas Tech.

When this became clear at halftime, Self pleaded with official John Higgins to no avail.

“To me, that makes zero sense,” Self said. “But they said that was the rule. And I’m sure they’re right. They said they had it other times. But that’s one (rule) that may need to be visited.”

After conferring with other KU officials after the game, Self was still certain that the rule penalized his team for making a positive play.

“A foul is a turnover,” Self said. “So that’s a bad rule, and I would argue anybody on that one.”

•  Kansas scored a season-low 60 points, its lowest output since scoring 59 in the NCAA title game against Kentucky.
KC Star

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“I feel a lot of people are going to start playing us like that,” Withey said. “Iowa State played us like this (in KU’s overtime victory on Wednesday in Allen Fieldhouse). We have to learn from it and get better.

“He (Young) had a great game the second half,” Withey added. “The first half he made some bonehead plays; the second half he showed energy. He was starting to get dunks.”

Noted Young: “We have a 7-footer down there. He has to touch the ball. He has to get off more than three shots a game. I think the next game (8 p.m. Monday at home vs. Baylor) we’ll work on that a lot.”
LJW


Billed as one of the best sixth men in the country, Texas Tech’s Jaye Crockett had a game to forget against Kansas University on Saturday at United Spirit Arena.

“We just guarded him,” KU coach Bill Self said of the Jayhawks’ work on 14.8 point a game scorer Crockett, who totaled three points off 1-of-8 shooting in 28 minutes in the Jayhawks’ 60-46 win over the Red Raiders.

“He made the three late, I guess his only points,” Self added of Tech’s final basket. “We did a good job on him. Our defense ... you go in anybody’s building and the other team scores 46, that’s pretty good. Their field goal percentage was down (35.4 percent, 4-of-11 from three). We turned them over the first half (13 times; 16 total). We did some good things.”

KU committed nine turnovers.

“It wasn’t a lot. Nine is an unbelievable number for us,” said Self, whose squad had eight assists to Tech’s 11. “The problem is there’s no assists. Elijah (Johnson, four assists, four turnovers) never got in the paint and made plays for others. Naadir (Tharpe, two threes, one assist, two turnovers) didn’t get in the paint and make plays for others.

“Ben and Travis didn’t drive it much,” he added of Ben McLemore (10 points, 2-7 shooting and 6-8 free throwing) and Travis Releford (12 points, 4-5 shooting, 4-4 free throwing). They (Raiders) played it smart. If you only score 19 baskets (in 41 shot attempts) you are not going to get a ton of assists. You can’t get 25 assists if you only score 19 baskets. A lot of our baskets were in transition off steals and stuff. That doesn’t create opportunities.”
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Red Raiders interim head coach Chris Walker, elevated when Billy Gillispie lost his job, discussed the approach against McLemore.

"We just wanted to limit his touches," Walker said. "He's a great player, taking nothing away from him. He didn't take as many shots as he normally had taken."

McLemore's such a great finisher on drives to the hoop that Tech's approach was to try to stymie the drives at the beginning.

"We just didn't want to let him have clean looks," Walker said. "That was our No. 1 goal. Not let him have clean looks, and to push him a little higher, really stay on his dribble and force him to drive the ball, because he's really good with space. I don't know if it was us or him today, but we did slow him up. I think our guys did a good job on him."
LJW

Lunatics who trust comparative scores in attempting to forecast outcomes will note that Baylor and Kansas, the Big 12 powers who meet for the first time this season Monday night in Allen Fieldhouse, both played Texas Tech in United Spirit Arena this past week with distinctly different results.

Kansas stretched a two-point halftime lead into a 60-46 victory Saturday against the Red Raiders, four days after visiting Baylor scored an 82-48 slaughter.

Is it a mistake to read anything into the outcomes?

“Most definitely,” Tech interim head coach Chris Walker said. “I wouldn’t even comment who is the better team.”

But when Walker talked about his two most recent foes it sounded as if he likes KU’s chances of staying unbeaten in the Big 12.

“First of all, it’s in Lawrence, I believe, and that is something in and of itself,” Walker said. “And Kansas has guys who played in the championship game. They have four seniors and a guy predicted to be a lottery pick, and Baylor has pros on its end too. So it’s going to be a heck of a game with a lot of future NBA players on the floor.”

…The obvious home-court advantage cited by Walker ranks as the biggest but far from the only reason to like Kansas extending to 31 an Allen Fieldhouse winning streak seriously challenged the past two games. Even when its offense drops into a prolonged funk, the defensive intensity doesn’t fall as far with it. Plus, the veteran Jayhawks won’t let the Bears’ flapping jaws erode their composure. The Red Raiders were tagged with two technical fouls in the loss to Baylor, and both could be traced to Baylor players egging them into retaliating to trash talking.

Self won’t have much time to dissect what went wrong in Saturday’s lackluster victory.

“I want them to forget about it,” Self said. “There are things we may learn from them and show them five minutes of edit clips or whatever. But we need to put our focus on Baylor."
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LJW Rankings: KY takes top spot


Texas Tech coach Chris Walker said the Red Raiders showed they can play top-10 teams and stay close.

"Obviously there are some things we've got to continue to work on," the interim coach said. "Kansas is a team where you can't make mistakes. They've got a lot of senior leadership and they just take their time and take advantage of every mistake."

The Jayhawks have a quick turnaround, playing Baylor at home on Monday night.

"I don't know how you guys feel, but we looked like a tired team," Self said. "So we need to get our batteries recharged."

Releford knows the bull's eye is on the Jayhawks.

"We know every game coming out is going to be tough because we're a team that every team wants to beat because of what we've done in the past," the senior said.
KTXS


The crowd at United Spirit Arena rocked a little louder with each free throw that Jamal Williams dropped through the net, cutting the lead to four ... then three ... then two against mighty Kansas.

That was the deficit Texas Tech was staring at heading into the half against the No. 6 Jayhawks on Saturday, 20 minutes from the kind of upset that didn’t seem possible for anyone who saw the team sputter on this court in a 34-point loss to Baylor four days earlier.

“Since the beginning of the game, we were confident,” Williams said. “The three free throws (which cut the lead to 27-25) kept us focused on coming out in the second half and playing even harder.”

Unfortunately for the Red Raiders, Kansas woke up in time to do what a highly experienced team one year removed from a berth in the national championship game is capable of: It blistered Tech out of the gates after intermission on the way to a 60-46 victory, its 13th straight.

“We had to decide whether we wanted to be here or not,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.

Kevin Young decided he did.

After Williams, who started in place of the suspended Trency Jackson, scored on a breakaway dunk to cut the lead to 29-28 about 90 seconds into the second half, Young — one of Kansas’ four senior starters — scored six of his game-high 14 points during a 12-0 Jayhawks run. Tech wouldn’t come closer than nine points the rest of the way.

“We got too comfortable,” said Williams, who scored a team-high 11 points, “and they noticed that we got comfortable. That’s when they took the first punch.”
Lubbock AJ

Just before halftime, Ray Allen rose from his seat on the Miami Heat bench and began waving a towel.

It was his way of cooling off Mario Chalmers, who had just hit a 3-pointer. It was that kind of the night. Chalmers scored a season-high 34 points Saturday in the Heat’s 128-99 victory against the Sacramento Kings, snapping a two-game losing skid. He made 10 of 13 3-pointers, tying the franchise record set by Brian Shaw against the Milwaukee Bucks April 8, 1993. 
Sun-Sentinel


1/11/13, 8:12 PM
Paul Pierce (23,293) just passed Dominique Wilkins (Hawks) for 11th on the @NBA all-time scoring list with one team. George Gervin is 10th.
https://twitter.com/seangrandepbp


1/11/13, 10:34 PM
TTFU!!! RT @shaopeng_shen: @SportandoBasket Xinjiang has confirmed Darnell Jackson's signing,he will play tomorrow.
https://twitter.com/dblock_official


Few teams have made Allen Fieldhouse a cozy home away from home quite like the No. 1 Lady Bears have in recent years.

Nobody on Baylor’s roster has lost to Kansas, a winning streak that dates back to a rare loss in Lawrence, Kan. in 2009. Since then, the Lady Bears are 5-0 and averaging a 31-point margin of victory over the Jayhawks. Two of those blowouts were at the palatial and traditionally rowdy Allen Fieldhouse.

So some may know the cathedral of basketball as a chopping block. Baylor just knows it as another arena, albeit a grand, historic one.

…The Lady Bears will visit Allen Fieldhouse and walk through the rows of Kansas’ trophies behind glass during their trip for today’s game at 1:30 p.m. It’s an effort to soak up the basketball culture orbiting that building.

“It’s just the history of the game,” Baylor coach Kim Mulkey said. “The returning players have heard my spiel, that when we go there I make sure that they understand the Fieldhouse and what it means.”
Waco Tribune


After the Baylor women’s basketball team capped an undefeated 2011-12 season with a national championship, Kansas University coach Bonnie Henrickson had one piece of advice for Baylor star Brittney Griner.

“I was all for her leaving early,” Henrickson said of the national player of the year.

Henrickson’s hope did not come true, and Griner elected to return to Baylor for her senior season. The dominant center will play her final game in Allen Fieldhouse at 1:30 p.m. today, when the top-ranked Bears take on No. 17 Kansas. With the game representing the final shot at the Bears at home, several KU seniors are hoping everything they’ve learned during previous match-ups with the Baylor beast will help them pull off the upset today.

“I think every team that gets multiple shots at them does that,” KU senior point guard Angel Goodrich said of piecing together information from previous match-ups to try to come up with the perfect game plan. “You just can’t go in there scared. They’re a great team, they have the best player in the nation, and they have great guards around her. They’re really good. But you just have to go in there and play your hardest.”
LJW

Congratulations are in order today - to the people who've been speculating that Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis are planning a wedding.

You were right.

A rep for Olivia, 28, confirmed today that she is engaged to the 37-year-old "Saturday Night Live" cast member, who grew up in Johnson County.

They've been dating since November 2011 and have made several notable appearances at University of Kansas basketball games. Some of the first paparazzi photos of the two together showed Olivia sporting a KU stocking cap on the streets of New York City.

People magazine reports that they got engaged shortly after the holidays. Olivia denied the engagement rumors on Twitter in December.

This will be a second marriage for both. Olivia was married for nearly eight years to Italian Prince Tao Ruspoli. Jason is divorced from "30 Rock" writer and producer Kay Cannon.

Rumor has it the two are planning a wedding later this year in Lawrence.
KC Star


VOTE for Kansas players, team, and moment in NCAA 75th Anniversary of March Madness (Vote for Wilt, Clyde, Danny, 51-52 Kansas, Mario's Miracle)
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Patsy Sutton, 74, died Tuesday after a stroke on Dec. 28, and was eulogized Friday at First United Methodist Church in downtown Tulsa. Luminaries like Jerry Jones, Frank Broyles, Bill Self, Ken Hayes, Mike Gundy, Travis Ford, Joe Castiglione and scores of ex-players who suited up for Patsy's famous husband, Eddie Sutton, paid their respects.

On Thursday night, Sean and younger brother Scott - assistant coach and head coach, respectively, of the Oral Roberts University men's basketball team - led the Golden Eagles to a dramatic home victory over Southland Conference opponent Northwestern State.

And on Friday afternoon, Eddie, Sean, Scott and older brother Steve laid their matriarch to rest.

Friday was emotional, of course. So was Thursday.

"I thought about (this) tonight: This is the first time I'm ever gonna be involved in a game that my mom isn't gonna be watching or listening or attending," Sean whispered prior to the Northwestern State game, his lip quivering. "After the game, whether it was in person or on the road, she always sent a text message or she'd always call, something, regardless of the outcome. It just kind of hit me walking in tonight."

…"It's not an easy life," former Kansas and ORU coach Ted Owens said Friday, "but if ever there was a model for a coach's wife, it is Patsy Sutton. She was the rock of that family."
Tulsa World


“On the way back from West Virginia” last weekend, M'Baye said, “as I stepped back on the bus, I was excited about this game.”

It showed. M'Baye scored 15 points, including seven straight down the stretch to blow open the game and give the Sooners a 77-68 basketball victory over OSU on Saturday at Lloyd Noble Center.

“I always love rivalry games in the Big 12,” M'Baye said.

That's a good description. OU-OSU hoops remains a rivalry game. It's just not Bedlam anymore.

This was a far cry from Bedlam's salad days. It was not Desmond Mason vs. Eduardo Najera. Not Big Country vs. Ryan Minor. Not Billy and Eddie or Eddie and Kelvin.

But at least it was two teams with NCAA Tournament hopes. That's more than we've seen in recent years.

It was not high-caliber basketball, at least from the Cowboys. They shot 39 percent from the field and afterward admitted to not playing hard enough. You never heard that after a Sutton/Sampson game.
The Oklahoman


West Virginia is still looking.

Confident they were changing their fortunes after Wednesday's comeback win at Texas, the Mountaineers left the Coliseum Saturday with another loss to a ranked and RPI top-100 team.

Kansas State, No. 18 in the Associated Press poll and No. 43 in the RPI, used a late run to push back WVU's rally and emerged from a series of late swings to beat the Mountaineers 65-64 before a crowd of 10,039.

…Southwell was fouled by Dominique Rutledge with 21.4 seconds to go and made both his free throws.

"It was a dumb foul," Harris said. "I don't even think it was a foul, honestly. I think the guy just tripped. But, whatever, he got fouled and they go up. That's the difference in the game."
Daily Mail


Freshman Georges Niang scored a season-high 18 points, Will Clyburn added 16 and Iowa State rolled past Texas 82-62 Saturday in its Big 12 home opener.

Tyrus McGee had 15 points off the bench for the Cyclones (11-4, 1-1 Big 12), who bounced back from a heartbreaking loss at No. 6 Kansas by pounding the struggling Longhorns (8-8, 0-3).

Iowa State built an 11-point halftime lead and maintained a comfortable edge the rest of the way in beating Texas for just the second time in 11 tries.

Johnathan Holmes and Julien Lewis each had 15 points to lead the Longhorns.
AP


Before this season, the last time that Kentucky, UNC and UCLA were all out of The Associated Press Top 25 in the same week was March 12, 1990. But Kentucky and UCLA - both counting on touted freshmen like Muhammad and Nerlens Noel - were out of the poll by the start of December; North Carolina dropped out the day before Christmas.

Of the trio, the Tar Heels (11-5) may be on the shakiest ground. North Carolina started at No. 11 and reached ninth in Top 25, but it lost at Virginia over the weekend then at home to Miami on Thursday. And while the last UNC team to start 0-2 in the ACC won the NCAA title in 2009, this year's group hasn't shown similar promise.

…The Wildcats lost at home Saturday to Texas A&M 83-71, breaking a 24-game home winning streak in Southeastern Conference games. They won their SEC opener Thursday at Vanderbilt but almost blew a 16-point second-half lead.

…Things have started to turn around in Westwood.

The Bruins, who started the year at No. 13, got behind when Muhammad missed two weeks of preseason practice with a shoulder injury then missed the first three games due to improper benefits before the NCAA cleared him to play.

But UCLA (14-3, 4-0 Pac-12) hasn't lost since falling to San Diego State on Dec. 1, and the Bruins beat then-No. 7 Missouri.

"Our kids have really improved a lot ... we still have a long way to go," UCLA coach Ben Howland said.
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1/12/13, 7:20 PM
Did Ku win? Didn t watch the game. I was playing and had 24 pts and 10 reb on 10-10 shooting #rockboyz #kubball
https://twitter.com/jojo_embiid


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