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Sunday, April 06, 2003

NEW ORLEANS -- The Final Four was supposed to be the one major American sporting event that never let us down. The Super Bowl might have its blowouts, the World Series its duds, but we could always rest assured the final two rounds of the championship of college basketball would be the height of drama, the epitome of competitiveness and memories to cherish.

Not anymore.

Marquette, of all teams, turned this grand competition into a dreadfully boring snooze last night in the first game of the national semifinal doubleheader at the Louisiana Superdome. The team that upset Pitt and crushed No. 1-seed Kentucky in the Midwest Region was expected to be a contender for the national championship. The Golden Eagles turned up a pretender, not very golden and a 94-61 loser to Kansas in a humiliation that was painful to watch. Marquette scored only two more points in the entire game than Kansas scored in the first half.

This was a distinctly different Marquette team from the one that won the Midwest Region. The brilliance of Dwyane Wade was mostly absent. The cool floor play of Travis Diener disappeared. The amazingly accurate 3-point shooting of Steve Novak was absent. The dominating inside play of Robert Jackson wasn't so dominating.

Marquette trailed by an astonishing 29 points at halftime as Kansas went on runs of 23-4 and 20-8.

Kansas Coach Roy Williams would not allow the large lead let he or his players become complacent. He remembered a Kansas loss to Arizona in January. "We had Arizona by 20 and lost by 17. That's a 37-point swing. I mentioned that to our guys at halftime. I wanted them to play."

They did. The Jayhawks outscored Marquette, 18-4, at the start of the second half, to extend their lead to 43 points.

It was difficult to watch the proud Marquette players come apart on college basketball's largest stage. Anyone who hadn't seen the Golden Eagles in their previous two games would have wondered what this team was doing here.

"We're extremely disappointed," said Diener, who made 1 of 11 shots. "We know we can play better than this."

"As players, we feel we could have played better," said Wade, who scored 19. "But it was Kansas' night. They had a great game. Their transition game in unbelievable. On defense, they made us take tough shots."

The Jayhawks' widely acclaimed fastbreak was devastating as they repeatedly beat Marquette down the floor for easy baskets.

"I learned like a lot of other coaches that you can't prepare for the Kansas fastbreak," Marquette Coach Tom Crean said.

Nick Collison and Kirk Hinrich were the big names for Kansas, and they did not disappoint, but both were outplayed by the less-heralded Keith Langford, who scored 23 points -- 17 in the first half -- on 11-of-14 shooting and punctuated the rout with thundering dunks off fastbreaks.

"It's all about who's playing well on that night," Langford said. "Anyone can be beaten on any night. We've been beaten by teams that weren't ranked this year. It can happen to anyone."

Nothing went right for Marquette.

Novak, the cool 6-foot-10 freshman deadeye who shoots almost exclusively from 3-point range, missed all five of his attempts. This from a player who shot 53 percent from beyond the arc during the season. Crean rushed Novak into the game early as the Jayhawks were threatening to pull away. The Golden Eagles needed the lift that 3-pointers can give a team, but it never happened. Novak was getting mostly the same opportunities he had against Pitt and Kentucky, but the shots weren't falling.

No one could pick up Marquette, and you could almost see its confidence slipping away. The athletic Wade put some dazzling moves on Kansas, but his shots were not dropping.

"Even though we played very well, we realized they were missing open shots," Williams said. "It was fortunate for us they were missing their shots."

It's hard to believe Kansas is a team that opened the season 3-3 with losses to North Carolina, Florida and Oregon.

"We weren't playing together the way Coach wanted us to," Collison said. "Guys were shooting too quick. But we stuck together. We stuck by Coach. A lot of teams that started poorly would have blamed the coach or blamed their teammates. We realized we were playing poorly and took the responsibility for changing it."

Now they're one win away from Williams' first national championship -- which they'll get if they play tomorrow like they did last night.