The game that North Carolina Coach Roy Williams never wanted to schedule is going to be played Saturday. He cannot avoid Kansas.
When the teams meet in the N.C.A.A. tournament semifinals in San Antonio, it will be the first time Williams will coach against the team he guided for 15 years before leaving for North Carolina in 2003.
“If I was ever going to play Kansas again, this is the only way I would want it to happen,” Williams said Monday in a conference call. “The reason I say that I wouldn’t schedule them is very easy for me: because they’re my second-favorite college team. And those people gave me a chance. It’s a place that I loved for 15 years.
“I never scheduled North Carolina when I was at Kansas because for those 15 years North Carolina was my second-favorite team. And just I have too many great memories to consider somebody a foe on the other end of the court.”
Williams was a longtime assistant at North Carolina under Dean Smith. He led the Jayhawks to the Final Four four times but never won a championship.
His loyalty to the Jayhawks was seemingly sealed when he turned down a chance to coach North Carolina in 2000.
But when Smith and the Tar Heels came calling again in 2003, Williams said yes.
“When I stood up in front of those kids at Kansas and told ’em that I was leaving, and the feeling that I had when I walked out of that room, that’s a feeling I hope I never have again,” Williams said Friday. “Because I felt like I was, I felt like I was dirty.”
Jayhawks fans consoled themselves with the hiring of Bill Self from Illinois. He had a tough act to follow but has guided the Jayhawks to a Final Four.
“I felt like from Day 1 it was our team,” Self said Monday. “I really did. And I loved coaching the players that were here before.
“But it’s different when you walk into a situation saying, ‘O.K., guys, this is how we’re going to play and it works,’ and you haven’t won as much as a guy that played differently that was in there before you. So the players would maybe say: ‘Why do we want to play that way? We know this other way works.’ So that right there was to me the challenge: getting everyone to buy into that this was best for us.”
BRUINS GET PHYSICAL Memphis Coach John Calipari knows what to expect from U.C.L.A.’s defense in the Final Four: something resembling a football scrimmage.
“We know the challenge,” Calipari said during a conference call. “They’re great defensively. It’s body-to-body, mano-a-mano.
“You’re going to have some hands on your body, you’re going to drive and there are going to be two hands around your waist. You better be ready to go and play a man’s game, because that’s how they play.”
In reaching their third straight Final Four, the Bruins (35-3) have allowed 53 points a game in the N.C.A.A. tournament. Of course, they have not faced a team as explosive as the Tigers (37-1), who have averaged 85 points in the tournament.
“It’s just an incredible challenge to plan to defend them and score on them because of their athletic ability,” U.C.L.A. Coach Ben Howland said. (AP) LOPEZ TWINS GO PRO The Stanford sophomore Robin Lopez is joining his 7-foot brother Brook in entering the N.B.A. draft. The brothers made their announcement through their mother.
It was expected that Brook, a third-team all-American, would declare himself eligible for the N.B.A., but Robin was not so certain. Brook averaged 19.3 points and 8.2 rebounds this season, while Robin averaged 10.2 points and 5.2 rebounds. (AP)
WOODEN MAKES A PICK John Wooden will watch U.C.L.A. in the Final Four from his armchair, and he said he believed this was the Bruins’ year to win a record 12th national championship.
Two years ago, “we were in the Final Four and we finished second,” he said in a telephone interview. “Last year, we were third. Seems logical to be first this year, don’t you think?”
Wooden, 97, is back home after stints in the hospital and at a rehab center. He broke his left wrist and collarbone in a fall at his home in February. (AP)