They Don’t Relent, They Reinvent

Finally, four.

The teams that will meet in Atlanta to play for the NCAA title are neither the four most folks expected nor some outlandish group of mid-major miracles.

Just four great basketball programs, two that have won before--Indiana and Kansas--and two others trying to win their first NCAA title: Maryland and Oklahoma.

Who will be the one on April 1?

Kansas--the only team other than Duke to be ranked No. 1 this season--deserves the role of favorite. The Jayhawks are a team that has summoned the word “relentless” again and again.

Bob Knight used it after watching Kansas blow out his Texas Tech team, and Oregon Coach Ernie Kent uttered it after Sunday’s 104-86 loss in the Midwest Regional final--a game in which the Jayhawks outrebounded the Ducks by an astounding 63-34 margin.

Even Drew Gooden, whose 20-rebound performance was complemented by Nick Collison’s 25-point, 15-rebound game, said it: “We were relentless out there on the backboards.”

But Maryland sometimes seems to have an even more ferocious collection of talent, and the Terrapins, too, are relentless. They learned their lesson after last year’s Final Four, when Duke came from 22 points behind to eliminate them in the semifinals.

Duke has gone home to Durham, but Juan Dixon, Steve Blake, Lonny Baxter and Chris Wilcox will play as if the Blue Devils are on their heels until the buzzer sounds. (Unlike, we might add, the Blue Devils themselves, who dissolved into a scattershot group that did little more than throw up panicky three-pointers as Indiana closed in on its way to the upset.)

Pause, however, and consider this important bit of information: Oklahoma, seemingly an afterthought, has beaten both Kansas and Maryland this season.

The Sooners defeated the Terrapins by 16 in December in Norman, Okla.

Yes, it was a meaningless December road game, but it served notice that the Sooners have an inside-outside game with power forward Aaron McGhee and supremely strong-willed guard Hollis Price that can counter Baxter and Dixon.

The Sooners also beat Kansas, lurking in the Big 12 while the Jayhawks swept through the conference with a 16-0 record, then unveiling a blueprint of how to beat Kansas in the Big 12 title game. The lessons: Refuse to run, and clamp down with tough, physical defense. It was a victory far more thorough than the final nine-point margin.

Now it’s quite possible that the Big 12, which proved its superiority among conferences with its tournament performance, will have two teams in the championship game, a replay of the 1988 game between the Jayhawks and Sooners.

That year, the Kansas team led by Danny Manning that came to be known as Danny and the Miracles beat an Oklahoma team coached by Billy Tubbs, a running, pressing team led by Mookie Blaylock, Harvey Grant and Stacey King that was the image of relentlessness in its day.

Tubbs is long gone, and this Final Four brings an opportunity for a new era of coaches. None is newer than Mike Davis, trying to shirk the shadow of Bob Knight at Indiana.

For now, Indiana fans hang on every update on the ankle of red-haired guard Tom Coverdale--or simply “Cov” as he is known in Hoosierland.

Officially, he is questionable for Saturday against Oklahoma. Unofficially?

“Tom is playing. Next question,” guard A.J. Moye said. “If you did an autopsy, this kid probably has titanium running through his veins.”

Don’t be fooled by the feel-good story in Bloomington, however: Indiana teams that reach the Final Four are supposed to win.

Five of seven have, with Knight’s 1973 and ’92 teams the only exceptions. (He won titles in ‘76, ’81 and ‘87, and Branch McCracken won in 1940 and ’53.)

Incredibly, despite Indiana’s great run, a loss in the semifinals won’t seem good enough.

Nor will it be for Kansas, where Roy Williams has inherited the mantle once worn by Dean Smith, his mentor at North Carolina: Can’t Win the Big One.

Smith reached six Final Fours before he won his first title, in 1982. He ended his career with two titles in 11 trips.

Williams has been twice, in 1991 and ‘93, losing to Duke in the title game the first time and to North Carolina in the semifinals. (His real burden has been losing before reaching the Final Four.)

But with no schools from his native state in Atlanta, maybe this time Williams will win and add to Kansas’ collection of two titles.

Oklahoma has yet to win one in three trips to the Final Four.

Kelvin Sampson, like Davis, is making his first trip--a notable passage for minority coaches. Since John Thompson broke the barrier with Georgetown in 1982, there has never been more than one minority coach in the Final Four. (Davis is African American, and Sampson is Native American.)

Neither Williams nor the newcomers can match Maryland’s Gary Williams for the doggedness of his demons, however.

Gary Williams, even more than Roy Williams, is reminiscent of Lute Olson before Arizona finally won in 1997 and Jim Calhoun before Connecticut won in 1999.

As much as Olson and Calhoun said their careers would be fulfilling if they never won--Smith faced that question, too--the truth seemed to be that until they won they were always agitated by something, and after they won they were changed, calmed, more complete.

Gary Williams, with that decisive victory over Duke in the second meeting this season in his pocket and the Blue Devils out of the way, just might be able to bring his alma mater its first title, one year after taking Maryland to its first Final Four.