PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Two sexagenarian coaches who have lived March Madness from many a high-seed vista, even opposing one another twice in shining title games of closing Monday nights, spent Thursday evening brawling around one of those 7-vs.-10 alleys with the records clunky and the seedings proletariat. It fit the seasons of John Calipari and Bill Self, if not their histories, that when the horn sounded both teams stood at 21-13.
Yet while the 21-13 of Self’s No. 7 seed Kansas marks the ending and the most losses that kingdom has incurred since 1983, the 21-13 of Calipari’s No. 10 seed Arkansas looks pretty spry. That has to be part of why Calipari jogged off the court looking plenty spry at 66, with the 79-72 win over Kansas coming 19 days after his first Razorbacks team trailed by 35 at South Carolina and looked lost in the woods of late winter and two months after his team began its SEC assignments at 0-5 and then 1-6.
“Took us three times to get it in,” he said of the inbounds process with 12 seconds left and the score still 75-72, a process that required two timeouts. “I don’t care. We won.”
In some ways, the coach who has navigated the brackets with six different No. 1 seeds, seven different No. 2s and three No. 3s — while coaching Massachusetts, Memphis and Kentucky (for 15 seasons until last spring) — seems suited for the lowest seeding any of his 24 tournament teams have brought. He once shepherded a No. 8 seed Kentucky clear to the closing Monday night of 2014 before it fell barely, and he doesn’t mind telling you when everybody put his most recent team in the crypt and “forgot the nails,” as he put it Wednesday. It suits his pugnacity.
Now, as he and Self met in an odd place in the brackets and on the map, 17 years after Self’s Kansas pipped Calipari’s Memphis in the 2008 national championship game and 13 years after Calipari’s Kentucky mastered Self’s Kansas in the 2012 national championship game, he brought along his depth-less squad and brought back one player, guard Boogie Fland, whose availability gave way to injury way back on Jan. 21.
Whatever, he and the Razorbacks got 22 points from big man Jonas Aidoo, more than the graduate student and Tennessee transfer had gotten all year, and he and they got a pivotal juncture with 1:47 left, when Johnell Davis found himself out near the bench on the right side of the court.
“What did you hear?” Calipari asked Davis, the graduate transfer from Florida Atlantic seated next to Calipari on the interview dais.
“I heard the background just say, ‘Shoot it!’” Davis said.
Calipari, of course, provided that background and background noise, and when the three-point shot rattled in, Arkansas bolted to a 71-67 lead. It would have enough to surmount the flummoxing zones Kansas threw at it midway through the second half and to surmount a 67-64 deficit because four starters would end up in double figures and because Trevon Brazile would provide great energy and because of Aidoo’s grown-up post play. “I knew it was going to be a big matchup,” he said of his bang-a-thon with Kansas forever college player Hunter Dickinson, “and I know how to take that personal.”
“We just rely on everybody,” Calipari said. “When you’re down in numbers, everybody’s got to help you.” Getting going with the sermon as he can, he soon said, “Every one of us, including me, had doubts, and we all had to convince ourselves we’re going to do this.”
He had been in the soup and had climbed out, while Self’s run through his 22nd Kansas season never did really add up. Somehow it ended with his deeply experienced team doing something rarely seen in highbrow basketball, mucking the closing five minutes with six galling turnovers. Grinding down into an inability to complete passes in its half-court sets, Kansas leaked turnovers at 4:14, at 3:13, at 3:01, at 2:34, at 1:59 and at 0:45.
It looked remarkable in its struggle, but something far worse happened at the 3:10 mark. That’s when KJ Adams, the ever-respectable senior forward, fell to the floor in a troubling turn and needed two teammates’ help exiting the court. Self said an Achilles’ injury seemed probable, so instead of giving a postgame and postseason talk, Self said, he and his coaches and players had to comfort Adams and his family. “It’s one thing to lose the game,” Self said, “but for him to potentially lose a year on top of the game, that’s a really big blow.”
It curtailed a season that began as preseason No. 1 and detoured into murk. To a question from Matt Norlander of CBS Sports about how Kansas might regain its Kansas-ness after losing 24 games the past two seasons, three years after it won Self’s second national title in 2022, Self said gently as usual: “That’s a fair question. I think it’s a fair question that in some ways is an unrealistic question, though. If I’m not mistaken, no matter what you do in life, there’s ups and downs. We just didn’t have very many downs [in previous seasons].”
His roster had included a 24-year-old graduate senior in Dajuan Harris Jr., whose brilliance on perimeter defense had helped Kansas overcome a 55-44 deficit for a 67-64 lead, and a 24-year-old graduate senior in Dickinson, whose career at Michigan and Kansas finally ended when his three-point shot clanged off with 21 seconds left, leaving him 4 for 13 with 11 points, nine rebounds, four turnovers and four assists. Self said he would have taken that roster any year at the outset but said, “Our roster was good enough to be competitive, but it probably wasn’t a roster to be talked about in the way the best teams in the country are being talked about.”
He also said, at one point, after referencing the turnovers, “I don’t know what it was.”
It showed how sometimes even the coaches who have been above the clouds don’t even know what it was, while others might wonder and then find the way. That would be Calipari, on to another second round after a night spent in the back alleys of the brackets.
