By DAVE SKRETTA AP Basketball Writer
NEW ORLEANS — In a national championship game that nobody at Kansas will soon forget, Bill Self went from the Hall of Fame coach who far too often failed on the big stage to the brilliant mastermind of the biggest comeback in NCAA title game history.
Blitzed by North Carolina for most of the first 20 minutes Monday night, and after digging a seemingly insurmountable 40-25 deficit, the senior-heavy Jayhawks rallied for a 72-69 victory over the Tar Heels inside the boisterous Superdome to raise another long-awaited banner to the rafters of historic Allen Fieldhouse.
“I think when you’re the all-time winningest program – just by a small margin – and when the inventor of the game was your first coach, and the likes of Adolph Rupp comes from Kansas and Dean Smith comes from Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain comes from Kansas, the expectations are where being good is OK but it’s not enough,” Self said.
“Nobody’s ever put pressure on me that we’ve got to win another one,” he added, “but I think I put pressure on myself knowing that this place deserves more than what we have won.”
The Jayhawks, who trailed the Tar Heels by 16 late in the first half Monday night, eclipsed Loyola of Chicago’s 15-point comeback to beat Cincinnati in overtime in 1963 for the biggest in title game history. They also set a record by overcoming the biggest halftime deficit in a Final Four game.
“With the group of guys as experienced as this and been around and know each other so well, it’s kind of hard to see us get rattled. And I think we bounced back at halftime,” Kansas forward Mitch Lightfoot said. “Coach had a great message for us, and he challenged us to be better, and to have more pride. And we did that.”
David McCormack finished with 15 points and 10 rebounds, dueling in the paint all night with ailing Carolina big man Armando Bacot. Remy Martin poured in 11 of his 14 points after the break, while Jalen Wilson had 15 points – including a couple of big baskets early in the second half, when the Jayhawks managed to turn a blowout into a ballgame.
“Coach, he obviously challenged us and was amped,” said the Jayhawks’ Ochai Agbaji, “but it was a matter of us playing our game and executing in the second half and taking away what they were getting at in the first half.”
It’s the fourth title for the Jayhawks and the second for Self, who claimed his first when another bunch of comeback kids rallied to beat Memphis in overtime in 2008. And this one came on the same Superdome floor where Kentucky denied him in the finals a decade ago, one of the many heartbreaks that Self and his team have experienced over the years.
There was the 2010 team that spent much of the season ranked No. 1 but lost in the second round of the tournament, and the following year the Jayhawks didn’t lose until late January but were dumped by VCU in the Elite Eight.
There was also the 2013 overtime loss to Michigan in the Sweet 16, and back-to-back years in which Kansas failed to make it out of the tournament’s opening weekend. More recently, there was the 2018 Final Four blowout by Villanova – which Kansas avenged Saturday night – and second-round exits in each of the previous two NCAA Tournaments.
The Tar Heels were poised to add to the heartache on Monday night.
They dominated the offensive glass in the first half, and scored second-chance baskets nearly at will, while Kansas went through long periods of offensive ineptitude. Martin was 1 of 5 from the field, his only make a clanked 3 off the backboard, and Wilson and Christian Braun were a combined 2 for 13 from the floor.
At halftime, Self referenced the Jayhawks’ 2008 national championship comeback with his team, asking if they’d rather be down by nine with two minutes left –as they were that night – or down by 15 with 20 minutes still to play.
It took about 10 minutes to learn their answer.
The trio of Braun, McCormack and Wilson went to work to start the second half, wiping out North Carolina’s hard-earned lead and finally pulling even when Agbaji – the Final Four MVP – converted a three-point play with 10:53 to go.
It was a back-and-forth affair until McCormack gathered his own rebound and scored with 1:16 left. Bacot turned the ball over at the other end when his sprained ankle from the semifinals against Duke finally gave out. Then, McCormack added another basket with 22.3 seconds left to give the Jayhawks some breathing room.
“Game’s on the line,” McCormack said. “Coach talks about keeping the ball high, going right back up. That’s what was going through my mind. We work on tough shots every day. I work on both hands, get a quick basket, get back on defense.”
Caleb Love and Puff Johnson both missed tying 3-point tries, then North Carolina got one last chance when Dajuan Harris turned the ball over with 4.3 seconds left. The Tar Heels again got the ball to Love, the hero of their dramatic win over the Blue Devils, but his shot missed as the clock expired and confetti began to fall from the sky.
The comeback broke the record for the largest halftime deficit overcome in a championship game, set by Kentucky in 1998, when the Wildcats rallied from down by 10 to beat Utah. It also broke the record for any Final Four halftime comeback of 11, set by Duke’s rally past Maryland in 2001 and Temple, when it beat Kansas State in the 1958 third-place game.
Perhaps more importantly, it wiped away any argument that Self will go down as one of the game’s greatest coaches.
“That wasn’t on my mind,” Self said, “but I do feel as many good teams we’ve had over time, we could have had more than one, so even though – like I said earlier – I never felt pressure from anybody that we had to do this, but I knew with what we have had that we could have very easily done more. So I actually think it means a lot to me.”
Armando Bacot kept battling, locking his jaw and gritting his way through a hobbling ankle injury for the chance to help North Carolina win a national championship.
He played through bumps and box-outs, ballscreens and blocked shots. At one point, he could only hop on one leg in a desperate attempt to get back downcourt on defense. And by the end of Monday night’s loss to Kansas, he couldn’t navigate even a few stairs without help.
“We came this far and this was a huge goal for us was to just hang up a banner,” Bacot said. “And we just really wanted to win. I really wouldn’t let anything stop us from getting to that point.”
The 6-foot-10 junior had been the anchoring presence in the paint all season for North Carolina, providing low-post scoring to go with his relentless work on the boards that made him one of the nation’s most unstoppable rebounders. But after rolling his right ankle in Saturday’s thrilling win against rival Duke in the national semifinals, Bacot gamely fought against Kansas’ physical David McCormack but never looked like himself.
“I really couldn’t, the whole game, get the push on anything on my post-ups, defensively, anything,” Bacot said. “It was just like I kind of was out there and it was just hard for me to really just stand my ground.”
Bacot finished with 15 points and 15 rebounds in 38 minutes, turning in a gutsy performance despite it being apparent to everyone in the Superdome that he was limited. He struggled significantly after halftime with just three points and five rebounds while missing 10 of 13 shots for the game with nearly all his production coming the foul line.
“It was not just tonight,” first-year coach Hubert Davis said of Bacot’s effort, adding: “The effort that he displayed, he’s done it all year consistently. And that’s why he’s one of the better players in the country.”
Bacot’s night ended when he drove on McCormack with the Tar Heels down 70-69 and his right ankle buckled as he tried to push off – the hardwood seeming to bow significantly as he planted – and he crumpled to the court.
He got up and started frantically hopping downcourt before the game was stopped with 38.5 seconds left, before ultimately being helped to the sideline.
“I thought I made a good move. I thought I really got the angle I wanted,” Bacot said. “I thought it would have been an easy basket. … I really couldn’t put any weight down on my right leg.
“And right then and there, I probably knew I was done at that point.”
Bacot’s right ankle had been a subject of scrutiny ever since he stepped on teammate Leaky Black’s foot late in the Duke win on Saturday. Bacot returned and gutted that game out, then assured anyone who would listen that he would be ready for the title tilt against Kansas.
But the signs were there long before the game ever tipped off that there would be trouble, with Bacot moving gingerly in pregame warmups before leaving his teammates behind to go back to the locker room before returning a bit later.
Bacot estimated he spent about 15 of the previous 24 hours doing every possible treatment to get ready to play against the Jayhawks. But Bacot said he still “really couldn’t even jump” even after every effort.
“We just kept trying to take a crack at it. They didn’t give up,” Bacot said of the training staff.
Bacot’s interior presence had been critical in Davis’ scheme that puts a premium on floor spacing to open room for outside-shooting teammates Caleb Love, R.J. Davis and Brady Manek.
But with Bacot struggling and no other player capable of replacing him inside, UNC shot just 31.5% and went 5 of 23 from 3-point range in a game that came down to the final play after the Tar Heels squandered a 16-point first-half lead.
Bacot’s effort Monday night made him the first player to have six double-doubles in one tournament, but that didn’t ease the sting of seeing the eighth-seeded Tar Heels’ remarkable postseason push fall one win short of a national championship.
When the postgame news conference ended, Bacot slowly got up and headed back to the edge of the dais.
“Somebody help Armando,” Hubert Davis said.
With that, Bacot wrapped his right arm around team spokesman Matt Bowers – who had helped Bacot up the steps earlier – and his left arm around news conference moderator Mark Fratto, then descended those eight stairs to hobble into the offseason.
