KU really needs to perform this post-season

This has been one heck of a year for KU. First, we enjoyed the summer success in the WUG in Korea--demonstrating that we could play as a team (even with far less than our full fall-winter squad) and bring home the gold against some decent international competition. Then we had a solid non-conference season, followed by an initially rocky Big 12 campaign that then proceeded to flip into one of the most impressive KU runs through our conference in our entire 12-year run of successive championships. We conquered some seriously talented teams, featuring very diverse attacks, even though everyone was gunning for us and hoping to bring down the King of the Hill.

We now head into the post-season on a serious roll (11 straight), and as arguably the hottest, most battle-tested team in the country. We also have proven our ability to win some very tight, nail-biter type games, including in some very challenging road arenas. Given all of that, it's hard not to be super-excited for the team, and bullish on its chances for success in the Dance.

But now it gets "real." And that means that the Hawks now have to prove that their super-impressive Big 12 success wasn't an aberration, and that they can close out other teams when it matters most--in the post-season.

Whether we like it or not as KU fans (and we most certainly do not), KU has a negative national rep for post-season failure. That's the narrative outside of the KU fan base, sadly, and no amount of successive Big 12 championships is going to change that. The only thing that will change it is post-season success: flipping the script, as it were, by punctuating a new narrative or counter-narrative.

I encountered this "failure narrative" yet again (albeit quite accidentally) Saturday night, among a bunch of "basketball dads" in northern VA who hold allegiances to schools that harbor no ill will toward KU (Virginia, Maryland, Michigan, et al.). We were talking about doing a tourney bracket for our son's team members, and the coach asked me if I tended to vote with my heart (for KU) each time. I said yes, it was hard not to. The Michigan guy (local in VA, but went to Michigan), who isn't known for being an ill-informed loudmouth, then piped up, saying "The only time I won a March Madness bracket contest was when I was playing with a bunch of Kansas fans. That's because they always have Kansas winning it all, but Kansas always loses. No offense, but that's just how it is--Kansas always loses."

Don't even get me started on what I wanted to say (or do) in response to this gibberish. I could've hit him upside the head with lots of stats and what-not to show that we actually aren't as bad as what the national narrative suggests. I could've brought up 2008, and noted that we were right back in the NC game in 2012. I could've talked about how any team that consistently gets ranked a 1 seed is going to encounter more than its fair share of upsets to a lesser seed. I could've trotted out the "injury bug" issue, Cliffgate, or whatever. But in the final analysis, it would've just been seen as a bunch of excuses. I would've come off as a thin-skinned, defensive KU fan (to the other dads), with scant chance of changing the narrative already implanted in their heads. And finally, it just wasn't worth wasting my time and personal social capital arguing with the guy in front of a room full of parents in that kind of social setting. Yet for the rest of the night, including as I nodded off to sleep, I couldn't escape the anger and disdain I felt for this guy, and more broadly for the narrative on the exceptional school and program that I--and all of us on this board--dearly love.

We can call the tourney a crapshoot all we want, but if we're going to be taken more seriously as an elite program, we need to register greater post-season success--which is what counts for the most in all sports at the end of each campaign. For KU, that starts with having a good post-season this year. The field has never been more wide open, there is no "elite" team standing in our way (like 2012), we just won the toughest conference in the land going away, we learned how to close out solid teams in the crunch, and we also proved that we can win in hostile environments on the road (which many tourney sites can morph into, given the David vs. Goliath syndrome that tends to engulf the tourney site arenas). Given all of that, I am hoping like crazy Coach Self and our guys get it done, and make a truly deep run this year. It's time to bury this "KU chokes" narrative once and for all, starting (hopefully) with the here and now: this post-season.

Some of you aren't going to like this "real talk" post, and I can almost predict those responses in advance. But this situation is real on a national scale (perception forming reality, even if we disagree with it)...and if we love our program and don't like seeing it sullied we really need to hope--with every fiber of our being--that KU can make some serious noise in the Dance this year, and in years ahead.

I wish we could bottle that attitude and loose-as-a-goose, playing-to-have-fun, step-on-their-neck performance that this team exhibited in Austin, for if we play like that on the biggest of stages over the next month, I have zero doubt that we will be the only team left standing come April 4th.

Here's to our beloved Hawks obliterating all of the doubters and negative Nancy non-KU fans out there. Go get 'em, boys!

Rock Chalk...

NotOstertag wrote: Anyway, IIRC that '97 team had some food poisoning or a flu bug hit the guys and it showed. So while the "casual fan" might see things like this a as a "choke" or "making excuses", the "invested fan" knows better.

Jerod Haase played the last half of the season with a broken wrist that never fully healed. He played thru pain every game and he couldn't shoot worth crap come tournament time.

Scot Pollard was playing on a broken foot.

2 of our starting 5 operating at significantly less than 100%.

Haase will play through; Pollard stress fracture

Food poisoning -- that I do not recall, but it may be that Jerod's and Scot's situations blocked that out of my memory -- less salient.