FanHouse Kansas Basketball

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- In the rematch, Kansas missed the free throws and Memphis had the final shot.
The Jayhawks won again, but not without a tougher-than-expected fight from the undermanned and supposedly overmatched Tigers.

Cole Aldrich had 18 points, 11 rebounds and blocked five shots, helping No. 1 Kansas overcome a sloppy night to hold off Memphis 57-55 in a rematch of the 2008 national championship game Tuesday.

No miracles from Mario, no confetti flying from the rafters, but still another exciting finish.

"I can tell you this for sure: I'm 32 but I'm getting out at 35," Memphis coach Josh Pastner said. "I don't know how these coaches coach until they're 70. It's unbelievable."

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It seems like every year the usual suspects are lined up as contenders for the best basketball conference in the country.

Big East. ACC. Pac-10. Big Ten.

But the Big 12 never seems to get much love, despite some impressive numbers that suggest the newest of the major conferences deserve to be part of the conversation. No conference has advanced more teams to Elite Eight (13) and Final Four (six) since 2002. The Kansas Jayhawks even cut down the nets in 2008.

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Kansas coach Bill Self has known the bulls-eye was coming the Jayhawks' way for quite some time.

But there is nothing like dealing with the reality that the rest of the nation is looking up at you, as Self came to realize Thursday when his Jayhawks were selected as the consensus preseason No.1 team in both the Associated Press and ESPN/USA Today Top 25 polls for just the second time in program history.

Now comes the difficult part of living up to those lofty expectations.

Danielle McCray has never played in the NCAA Tournament. "But I don't think you have to have been there to know what it takes to get there," the Kansas standout guard said this week. "We want it so bad, and I think we have it in us."

McCray and her teammates are trying to break a 10-year NCAA drought for the Jayhawks women's team. Four returning starters and McCray's emerging status as the top player in the Big 12 Conference may finally be the ticket.

After a 22-14 season that ended with a defeat in the WNIT title game, the Jayhawks have been picked to finish second in the Big 12 by the league's coaches. McCray, who averaged 21.6 points a game as a junior, has been selected as the preseason player of the year.

The Kansas Jayhawks are the No.1 choice almost every preseason basketball publication, now they are also the unanimous pick to win the Big 12 championship by the league coaches, according to the poll released Wednesday.

The Jayhawks, who return all five starters and pretty much all of their scoring from a season ago, received all 11 possible first-place votes by the Big 12 coaches (head coaches can not vote for their own team). In addition to the retuning starters, which include All-Big 12 First Team selections Sherron Collins and Cole Aldrich, Kansas also brings aboard one of the top recruiting classes in the nation.Collins and Aldrich have also been selected the preseason co-Players of the Year.

Kansas' basketball team may have an early-season problem, but Kansas' athletic department may have an even bigger mess on its hands.

The Kansas football and men's basketball teams are at odds, resulting in at least two skirmishes Tuesday and another early Wednesday morning. Sophomore guard Tyshawn Taylor suffered a thumb injury in one of the altercations and likely will not be available when the Jayhawks begin practicing next month.

The situation is serious enough that it demanded the attention of the school's administration, as well as basketball coach Bill Self and football coach Mark Mangino, on Wednesday.

Kansas and Texas should be the class of the Big 12 next basketball season and ESPN is certainly banking on as much.

The Big 12 and ESPN released its Big Monday package for the 2010 campaign and both the Jayhawks and Longhorns will appear four times each in the eight-game package, which includes an anticipated February 8th showdown between the two power teams. Kansas will likely enter the season as the nation's No.1 ranked team while Texas is bringing in an influx of young talent that should make the Longhorns a Top 10 team.

Anyone following the Henry-Kansas basketball drama this week has been thoroughly entertained.

Kansas coach Bill Self has to be scratching his head now wondering, "What just happened here?" Self and his staff had successfully lured Xavier and C.J. Henry, the offspring of former 1980s KU basketball standouts Carl and Barbara Henry, into the Jayhawks' fold after breaking their previous commitment to Memphis in April.

All was right in the slimy world of big-time college recruiting.

For a rather wild day, it looked like things were going to get even weirder than they usually do in the college basketball offseason. Even before the summer recruiting began. In the end, it was a lot of noise but no change. Xavier and C.J. Henry are still going to Kansas for the 2009-10 season, not reversing field to go to Kentucky to be with John Calipari.

Xavier Henry is one of the top-5 high school players in the country. He had already switched his commitment from Memphis to Kansas, but since he could not sign a new National Letter of Intent (NLI) he is not actually bound to Kansas until he shows up on the campus and signs the scholarship papers. His older brother, C.J. Henry, is a walk-on with the New York Yankees paying his way following a failed baseball career.

Could the NBA and its minimum age requirement really be guilty of hypocrisy?

It certainly appears that way to Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel and some other Big 12 coaches after watching the most recent NBA Finals and seeing which NBA players were pushed as the faces of the league throughout the season.

The straight out of high school players, who are the type of players the NBA no longer wants to be associated with, are now carrying the torch for the world's best pro game.

"If you follow the NBA, if you look at the guys who are promoted as the face of the NBA, you are talking about Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett," Capel said. "Those are four that jumped right out and none of those guys attended college and I don't think it hurt them."

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