NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: OKLAHOMA vs. KANSAS : Kickoff Time for the Title : Big Eight Teams Are No Surprise to One Another

Oklahoma Coach Billy Tubbs offers no apologies for the way his basketball team runs and guns, presses and steals and along the way runs up some pretty humiliating scores. All he offers is fair warning.

In his downhome Texas-Oklahoma drawl he tells a story to make his point: A man came across a rattlesnake that was freezing, so the man picked up the rattlesnake and put it under his shirt. The rattlesnake bit him. When the man asked the snake why it had bit him, the snake replied, “Hey, you knew what I was before you put me in there.”

Kansas, the team that will challenge Oklahoma in the title game of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. basketball tournament at Kemper Arena tonight, knows full well how deadly the Sooners are.

Kansas (26-11) and Oklahoma (35-3) met twice in Big Eight competition this season. Oklahoma won both games. Then Oklahoma won the Big Eight title, right here in Kemper Arena.

Kansas has heard the rattle and has seen the fangs.

Tubbs isn’t going to insult an opponent by letting up. Tubbs says that scoring points is fun and he wants his players to have fun. Tubbs says if you want to see second- and third-string players, you should go to a high school game. Tubbs says backing off is akin to point-shaving, and he doesn’t want to go to jail. Tubbs says the only reason other coaches don’t play this way is ‘cause they’re stupid.

Kansas Coach Larry Brown has been watching this act from close range for a long time now. He has no quarrel with it.

As Oklahoma center Stacey King puts it: “If other teams had the opportunity to do us like that, they would.”

Fair enough.

Kansas star Danny Manning knows that the Jayhawks’ only chance is to keep the game under control and slower than the Sooners would like to play it. Manning said, “If it’s in the 80s or 90s or, their lucky number 100, we’re in trouble.”

Earlier this season, Manning had 28 points in a game that Oklahoma won, at Kansas, 73-65. Manning had 37 points in the game Oklahoma won, 95-87, at Oklahoma.

Both pretty low-scoring games considering that Oklahoma averages 103 points a game and even scored 134 in one regulation-time game this season.

Remember seeing those scores? Figured it was just one big, strong Big Eight team knocking around a bunch of no-name weaklings?

And now here we are with two Big Eight teams in the final game.

So much for the East Coast basketball versus West Coast basketball debate. The national champion will be from right here in the heartland.

Oklahoma, which was seeded No. 1 in the Southeast Regional, really is not a surprise entry in the final game. Oklahoma’s victory over Arizona, seeded No. 1 in the West, was an upset of minor proportions.

But Kansas? The Jayhawks were seeded No. 6 in the Midwest.

It has been a long, tough season for Kansas. True, the Jayhawks have the player of the year in the marvelous Manning, but they also have had 15 lineup changes after losing players to academic problems, injuries and transfer. The low point of the season was when senior Archie Marshall went down with a painful knee injury in a loss to St. John’s at Madison Square Garden at the end of December.

Brown wept that night. The emotion, he said, flooded forth when he saw one of his favorite people in pain.

The adjustments that had to be made--hey, that’s just part of coaching.

After commenting on how well Brown has made changes and brought his team back, against all odds, Arizona Coach Lute Olson said, “Give me a vote for coach of the year and I’ll take Larry Brown in a second.”

The trick is to maximize the talents of four other players in concert with a great, great player who not only scores 24.6 points a game but who also rebounds and passes and draws two or three defenders, leaving his teammates open.

Even with a player like Manning, basketball has to be played as a team.

As every coach who has lost to Kansas in this tournament has said--it’s really not a one-man team.

Kansas forward Milt Newton had 20 points in the victory over Duke.

Oklahoma doesn’t have one really dominant player. Two of the Sooners’ big guys, King and Harvey Grant, share most of the scoring and rebounding work. King averages 22.5 points and 8.6 rebounds. Grant averages 21.1 points and 9.5 rebounds. But the rest of the Sooners are not far behind.

With the way the Sooners score, though, there are plenty of points to go around.

And yet it really is the Sooners’ defense that has been making the difference.

As Brown was trying to make the point that Oklahoma plays very serious defense, full-court pressure defense in addition to running up those big scores, he decided to comment on Billy Tubbs’ coaching, on the whole.

Brown said, “Billy makes light of himself and sometimes I get mad when he does. Look at his record. Look at what he’s done in the conference. He reminds me of Doug Moe, my dearest friend. Doug is one of the greatest coaches ever, but he makes light of it. Maybe now people can realize what a great coach Billy is.”