Bill Self, Kansas go from certain choke job to stunning recovery in blink of an eye | Opinion

NEW ORLEANS — They had it all the way. That’s how they’ll remember it in Kansas, right? No, no they won’t. Not even close.

This was a basketball disgrace followed by the country’s best team figuring out who it was. This was a 2½-hour battle of nerves and nausea that didn’t end until the final shot went up. This was a program with a long track record of NCAA Tournament choke jobs — and also a few miracles — choosing the path that would make them legends. 

And in the end, this was a national championship that will taste even sweeter because of how certain it seemed to have slipped away. 

“I think we are probably all a little overwhelmed and spent,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “It’s special to win regardless, but to win when your team had to fight and come back the way they did and show that much grit makes this one off the charts. I thought this would be good, and this is a heck of a lot better than I thought it would be.”

Kansas’ 72-69 victory over North Carolina will not go down as the most artistic or intelligent title game ever played. Both teams went through stretches of losing their minds, their self-control and their feel for a game they’ve played their entire lives.

But that happens in college basketball. Sometimes, it’s just about survival.

Self should know. His first four years at Kansas were defined by NCAA Tournament losses to Bucknell and Bradley, to the point where he needed to make a Final Four soon — very soon — or else start looking for a new place to coach. 

In more recent years, Self’s survival has been tied to an NCAA investigation that accused Kansas of five major violations in 2019 stemming from Adidas payments to recruits. The case, which could deal Kansas a postseason ban and Self a significant suspension, remains unresolved as the school and the NCAA wrangle over procedural issues. In the meantime, Self signed a lifetime contract that won’t allow him to be fired for cause and has now joined a group of just 16 coaches with multiple national titles. 

MORE: UNC guard Puff Johnson vomits, recovers, returns after blow to stomach

And Kansas has never needed that survival instinct more than Monday night after one of the worst halves of basketball you’ll ever see from a team that came to the Superdome for a coronation. 

“I’m like, ‘Why are you smiling dude? We’re down 15?’ ” Kansas guard Christian Braun said, having seen big man David McCormack come off the court at halftime in positive spirits. “He’s like, 'We’re alright. We’ve been here before.' And I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’ve been here before.’ ”

The only person who had actually been there before was Self, whose record includes some ignominious postseason losses of similar flavor with heavily favored teams. VCU bombed threes and raced past the Jayhawks into the Final Four. His Andrew Wiggins/Joel Embiid team didn't get to the second weekend because it lost to Stanford. The next year, Kansas got embarrassed by Wichita State. 

Bad NCAA Tournament losses happen to every coach, but each one gets a little harder to live down. And for an hour Monday, this one was on the path to becoming the pièce de résistance. 

For the first hour of this game, the only story was Kansas’ implosion, its Self-immolation, its utter panic against a North Carolina team that was supposed to be too injured and out of gas to make a go of it here. To call it a choke would be an insult to esophagi everywhere. It was a brain freeze so deep it could have reversed global warming. In a city renowned for public vomiting, Kansas was bent over with dry heaves.  

They didn’t rebound at all. They went seven minutes between shots for their best player, Ochai Agbaji. They tried to force-feed the post without much purpose, and the Tar Heels swallowed up everything. When North Carolina’s Puff Johnson put in an offensive rebound while Kansas players just stood around and watched to make it 40-25 at halftime, it was one of the most shockingly poor performances a favored team has ever had in the Final Four.

But at halftime, Self asked a simple question: Would you rather be down 15 with a half remaining or down nine with two minutes left? Self, of course, was referring to the 2008 championship when Kansas stormed back against a collapsing Memphis team and sent it to overtime on Mario Chalmers’ 3-pointer, providing an easy reference point for a team that hears about the so-called Mario Miracle from the first moment they step on campus. 

That team was the heir to Kansas’ previous title team in 1988, nicknamed “Danny and the Miracles” for how Danny Manning went on a crazy run to a championship with a team that was an afterthought No. 6 seed when the tournament began. 

This time, Kansas didn’t need a miracle. It just needed to get its act together. 

“He challenged us and was amped up in there,” Agbaji said of Self. “But it was a matter of executing and playing our game and taking away what they were getting in the first half.”

Self’s adjustments were effective immediately. He got Kansas to dig in harder on defense and push the ball in transition. He baited Tar Heels big man Armando Bacot to chase McCormack rather than allow him to park in the paint, where he had been dominant defensively in the first 20 minutes. 

Kansas was in trouble — big, big trouble. And then, in barely a blink, the Jayhawks were controlling everything, rolling downhill, making the big shots that missed by miles earlier. 

Of course, it wasn’t a straight run to the finish line, even after Kansas started the second half on a 31-10 run. They had to survive one more North Carolina push, a silly turnover with four seconds to go and a final desperate 3-pointer by Tar Heel guard Caleb Love that didn’t come particularly close. 

It might have been messy, but it was certainly a relief. 

“I do feel that as many good teams as we’ve had over time, that we could have had more than one,” Self said. “Even though I never felt pressure from anyone that we had to do this, I knew with what we've had, that we could have very easily done more.”

This was an undeniably charmed run for Kansas. Their second-round opponent, Creighton, lost 7-foot-1 center and Big East defensive player of the year Ryan Kalkbrenner to a knee injury one game earlier. The Jayhawks faced Villanova in the semifinals without second-leading scorer Justin Moore, who tore his Achilles in the final seconds of the Elite Eight. And in the final, they got a No. 8 seed in North Carolina with a banged-up Bacot, who gutted it out on the ankle he sprained near the end of the semifinals and then rolled his other one on a move to the basket with 50 seconds left that could have given the Tar Heels the lead. 

“I got the angle I wanted and thought it was going to be an easy basket,” Bacot said.

But it wasn’t, because this was Kansas’ year, and these are the things that fall in your favor when the basketball gods deem it so.

That doesn’t discredit Kansas’ title. If anything, it shows the benefit of building a program that is in the mix every year, consistently churning out terrific teams. You’re going to suffer some agonizing postseason losses along the way, but if you get enough quality at-bats good fortune will eventually smile on you. This year, it smiled on Self. For the fourth time in program history, it was Kansas’ turn. 

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken