Monday, March 9, 2009
ST. LOUIS — This Morning Brew was supposed to be about former Kansas assistant basketball coach Tim Jankovich. Jank’s Illinois State squad made the finals of the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament on Sunday in just his second season.
I perused through the media guide for his bio and stats and even had a few funny quips about the awesome names on his team (Champ Oguchi, Osiris Eldridge and Dinma Odiakosa all belong in the Name Hall of Fame).
But as Sunday’s championship game* drew to a close, I realized this is bigger than one coach.
*Despite 21 second-half points from Eldridge, the University of Northern Iowa hung on to defeat Jank’s Redbirds 60-57 in overtime. The win puts the Panthers in the NCAA Tournament for just the fifth time in school history.
Jayhawk basketball fans are spoiled. That’s not a bad thing, but Kansas is so good that conference titles pile up quicker than calories at McDonald’s and making the NCAA Tournament is a formality. It’s awesome, but it’s not the basketball I grew up with.
In the MVC, Final Fours and first round draft picks are foreign concepts, but the joy of winning the tournament in a one-bid league, which the Valley is this season, is second only to winning the National Championship.
The biggest difference between the BCS conferences and ones such as the Valley is attitude.
Traditional basketball powerhouses (Kansas, North Carolina, UCLA, etc.) are so used to the Dance that they’re only happy if they’re the last ones partying at midnight.
However, for teams like UNI, everything in that dance hall is spectacular. The band rocks, all the girls are beautiful and the punch tastes like it was squeezed from God’s tit.
Only one of the teams in the Scottrade Center on Sunday was going to the tourney. A Big 12 final between Kansas and Oklahoma may determine seeding, but those teams aren’t playing for their lives.
After the game, Jankovich tried to find the perfect words for his team.
“I was searching for profound, and come to find out there was no profound today,” he said. “If you haven’t been through it, I don’t even know how to describe the pain.”
It hurts when you get turned down for a dance in that hall, but not nearly as much as it does when you’re shut down at the door.
That’s the feeling I’ve missed since turning my attention to basketball the Kansas-way.
Most days the Jayhawks are better than their opponent. Everybody on the court knows it, and most of the time it goes as expected.
It’s a great feeling, but I missed the joy of watching the team I’m pulling for reach its ultimate goal without the world coming to a halt.
America held its collective breath with Mario Chalmers’ shot, but fewer than 10,000 people in St. Louis were even there to watch UNI’s Ali Farokhmanesh bury the deciding free throws on Sunday.
It’s a simple joy, yet it means almost as much to the Panthers and their fans as the National Championship did to the Jayhawks. And that’s pretty cool.
— — Edited by Realle Roth
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