'88 NCAA Title Run: "We Can Do Something Special Here"

Despite having the nation's top player in Danny Manning, the 1987-88 season looked like it was coming to an abrupt halt. Kansas State had just handed the Jayhawks their 11th loss of the season, this one coming in the Big Eight Tournament. To make matters worse, starting point guard Kevin Pritchard had a knee injury.

As KU officials were making preliminary plans for the NIT, as hoped, Kansas was awarded an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament.  But the team was down. It had been a long season of injuries and adversity. With a first-round NCAA Tournament match-up with Xavier looming, it appeared the season would end in mid-March.
However, some pre-tournament bulletin board material helped put Manning in the right frame of mind. Then the pieces fell into place. In April, Kansas would stand as champions of the 50th NCAA Tournament.

Mark Turgeon, a KU guard from 1984-87 and a graduate assistant coach on the 1988 team under Larry Brown, takes us through that memorable NCAA Tournament, culminating at Kemper Arena in Kansas City. Turgeon relayed this story to John Hendel in "History Making Jayhawk Basketball."   "Kevin Pritchard hurts a knee in the Big Eight Tournament and we lost the next night to K-State. We're the sixth seed in the NCAA Tournament and it's like we're practicing that week and we're not even sure we're going to get by Xavier, that the season was going to end on Friday.
"It was a weird feeling. I'm not saying they (the players) wanted it to end, but they wouldn't have minded if it ended at that time. Then one of their (Xavier) players said that he was going to stop Danny. That Danny was just an average player. He was overrated. We had that posted all over our blackboard.  We just took it to them and jumped all over them. N.C. State lost to Murray State. We played Murray and squeaked by them and basically played the way we played all year, not great but just good enough to win. We played good defense and it just kept getting better and better.
"Then Vandy upsets Pittsburgh and you see Danny's eyes getting a little bigger and everybody's getting a little bigger. Maybe we can do something special here. "We really worked hard that week in practice and really jumped all over Vanderbilt. And low and behold, K-State beats Purdue and we go to bed that night, we're saying to ourselves that we're going to the Final Four because we knew we could beat K-State the way we were playing.
"K-State was a tired team when we played them, they'd put so much into the Purdue game. Milt played a heckuva game and everybody came together and played a great game. As did our defense, which is what carried us the whole tournament, I feel. All of a sudden we're in the Final Four and you're thinking destiny at that point. "We're playing a team that we should have beat earlier in the year (Duke) and know we can beat. The eyes kept getting bigger and bigger and working harder and harder. Things are falling into place. We bust out on Duke 10-0 or something and hold on to win.
"I don't know if it (Oklahoma beating Arizona in the opposite semifinal game) was an upset, but I think down deep we would have rather played Oklahoma than Arizona because of the familiarity. We'd lost barely at Oklahoma late in the season because Danny fouled out with a minute to go.
"Coach Brown just had a feel. None of the assistants knew what he was going to do that game. And I don't think he knew what he was going to do. He had an idea what he wanted to do. But he reached down deep into the bench and played Lincoln (Minor) early and played Clint (Normore) a lot knowing he liked the way the game was going and he didn't want to put a stop to that.
"We were scoring at will and he didn't want to put a stop to that. We just weren't stopping them, either. They were on fire. He just had an unbelievable feel . At halftime we go in, it's not like the assistant coaches get together and talk about what we're going to do. Coach Brown just goes in and starts talking to them right away. He knows exactly what he wants to do.
"He started delaying in the second half with the big guys out on the floor. That was just him having a feel for the game. He coached probably the best game of his career at Kansas (83-79 win) in that championship game."