While watching the Kansas Jayhawks rock, chalk and shock the North Carolina Tarheels in the second game of the Final Four on Saturday night, I couldn’t help relating the feeling to something I’d felt almost exactly a decade earlier.
Ironically, the Runnin’ Utes shocked the same school on the same stage in the 1998 Final Four. What’s even more eerie is the similar fashion in which Utah and Kansas dismantled the seemingly invincible Tar Heels.
Back in 1998, Carolina had the likes of Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison and Shammond Williams to lead its ever-explosive offense and was the favorite to win the title. This year, the Tar Heels were lead by All-American Tyler Hansborough, Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington and were every bit the threat to score 80 points as their 1998 counterparts were.
Interestingly, both of North Carolina’s Final Four opponents were clear underdogs.
Utah’s conference, its patsy pre-season schedule (with the exception of Wake Forest) and No. 3 seeding in the tournament made North Carolina a clear favorite.
But the argument could be made that despite Kansas’ 20-game winning streak to start the season and the Jayhawks’ Big 12 championship to boot, they were just as big of an underdog — at least to embarrass the Tar Heels the way they did.
Kansas was a No. 1 seed coming into the tournament, but that didn’t change the fact that not a single person picked the Jayhawks to win the championship in my 22-person NCAA tournament challenge. Only one of those 22 people even picked Kansas to make it to the championship game.
If you think that sample is too small, consider that only 13.9 percent of the contestants on Yahoo picked the Jayhawks to make the championship game, and a significant portion of those people have user IDs like Jayhawker32, KUforlife and rockchalktitle69.
Vegas gave Kansas 3.5 points, which is big considering the neutral court and the fact that all four No. 1 seeds had made it to the Final Four for the first time ever.
Just like in 1998, it didn’t take some steely resolve for the “underdog” to pull off the upset.
In both instances, it was North Carolina that looked like it expected its opponent to roll over and respect the power blue in all its infinite glory.
And why not?
In 1998, UNC won by an average of 18 points before scoring just 55 points against the Utes.
In 2008, UNC’s average margin of victory was 25 points before running into the Jayhawks.
The other similarity is that neither Utah nor Kansas seemed the least bit fazed by who Carolina was or what it had done in the regular season.
In 1998, the Heels got healthy, first-half doses of Utah’s interior defense, its 3-point shooting and Andre Miller.
Ten years later, UNC found out what it was like to be out-hustled to every single loose ball and to get swarmed by the KU defense. Oh, and it also got a healthy dose of guard Brandon Rush.
Utah’s victory over UNC might go down as one of the bigger Final Four upsets in NCAA history, but Kansas’ will likely go down as one of the most impressive.
It takes a special team to make a talented team such as North Carolina look like it is playing in mud.
It takes a tremendous group effort to take a 40-12 lead on the No. 1 overall team in tournament.
It also takes an amazing team to respond to questions following a two-point win over a No. 10 seed with a 15-point win and an effort that made North Carolina look like Angola playing against the 1992 Dream Team.
Saturday night certainly belonged to the rock and chalk of Jayhawk basketball, but for any Utah fan with a sense of history, it wasn’t too difficult to use KU’s victory as a surrogate for when Andre Miller was cutting into a sea of powder blue and white as the mighty UNC fell.