When Unfair Perceptions Meet Reality

So Kansas enters Monday night carrying the banner of the basketball establishment. And make no mistake: The Jayhawks have, in Bill Self, someone who looks and sounds like he just came from a screen test to play the role of a good guy basketball coach. And they have pedigree.

Kansas won the national championship in 1952 when a bench-warmer named Dean Smith was assigned to try to scalp his teammates' tickets. ("I couldn't get anything for them," he said. "No one was really that interested in college basketball in Portland, Oregon.") The Jayhawks were involved in one of the greatest games in tournament history: the triple-overtime 1957 championship game against North Carolina. (For the record, their star player in that game, Wilt Chamberlain, left college after his sophomore year.) The 1988 Jayhawks -- the Danny and the Miracles team led by current KU assistant coach Danny Manning -- won the title in one of college basketball's best feel-good stories. Kansas plays its games at (Phog) Allen Fieldhouse, which is located on (James) Naismith Drive.

This is the seventh Final Four for Kansas since Memphis last made it in 1985. Dana Kirk, the last Memphis coach to take the Tigers to the Final Four, did jail time. The only other time Memphis was in the championship game it became the answer to a trivia question: Who was UCLA's opponent when Bill Walton hit 21 of 22 shots in the title game?

Calipari is as slick and clever as Self is polished and polite. No one will ever confuse him with Dean Smith or Roy Williams. But here's a fact: He took over a U-Mass. program that was coming off 10 straight losing seasons and built a national power. He took over a Memphis program that was foundering and has won more than 30 games three straight years and has his team one game from a national title.

You can make all the jokes you want about transcripts and history -- name a major program that doesn't have some serious skeletons in its basketball closet -- but in the end there's really only one thing Calipari and Self have in common: Both can really coach.

It doesn't matter where any of the players on the court Monday night came from. It matters where they are right now: in the national championship game. The best team will win and cut down the nets.

The past -- whether it be that of the schools, the coaches or the players -- doesn't matter. Both teams deserve to be here. To imply that one is somehow more worthy than the other is short-sighted, unfair and, quite simply, wrong.