Jerry Larson / Associated Press
No. 2 Baylor is no longer undefeated after No. 17, Kansas, surprised one of the favorites to reach the Final Four, 71-58, at Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday.
It’s a remarkable victory for a KU team that has struggled to show that it can survive the best shows this season, and could end up taking the Jayhawks (18-8, 12-6 Big 12) back into the Associated Press Top 10 with two weeks. until Selection Sunday.
Led by David McCormack and Marcus Garrett, Kansas held Jared Butler and Davion Mitchell’s Baylor backcourt to just 18 points as the KU home advantage was too much for the Bears. BU (18-1, 10-1 Big 12) now has only one victory in 16 attempts at Allen Fieldhouse. Just a month ago, the Jayhawks were staggering after losing five of nine games at Big 12. A streak of five consecutive wins in early February helped to reverse that.
Now, a win without a doubt over the best team in the country has the Jayhawks peaking as the calendar reaches March, while the Bears seek to correct any remaining mistakes before attempting their own race in the NCAA tournament.
Notable Artists
David McCormack, F, Kansas Jayhawks: 20 points, 3 rebounds, 3 blocks
Marcus Garrett, G, Kansas Jayhawks: 14 points, 7 rebounds, 2 assists
MaCio Teague, G, Baylor Bears: 18 points, 8 rebounds
Davion Mitchell, G, Baylor Bears: 13 points, 3 assists
McCormack, Rebounding Power Jayhawks
McCormack started the season as the most replaceable starter on the Jayhawks’ roster. As the calendar arrives in March, he is now arguably the most important player.
No proof was needed other than his performance on Saturday, when KU eliminated one of the few remaining unbeaten in college basketball. The striker, who scored just six points in the defeat at Baylor, when the two teams met in mid-January, scored Kansas’s first eight points in the game in four of four shots. McCormack would not miss a field goal until 16 minutes left and Kansas went up six.
With the Bears dependent on their guards to hit their outside shots to open a path to the edge, McCormack helped erase a series of Baylor’s drives during the game. It wasn’t just because the best three-point pitch team in the country (43.2 percent) was six to 26 behind the hoop on Saturday. It’s just that the Bears hardly caught their own mistakes.
Kansas overcame Baylor with a surprising margin of 48-28, which led to 17 second chance points for the Jayhawks. More than 30 of those rebounds came in Baylor’s mistakes.
The best chance the Bears had to retake the lead came at the end of the second half, when McCormack – who had played in trouble most of the night – picked up his fourth goal with six minutes remaining. Coach Bill Self had little choice but to replace his defensive anchor with KU leading, 56-51.
The Bears just weren’t able to take advantage. Kansas had a 12-3 run with McCormack on the sideline, which was interrupted only by the media timeout of less than four minutes, which allowed Self to put McCormack back on the ground.
For a starter who struggled to score more than 10 points per game during the first half of the season, McCormack has become indispensable at both ends of the field. The Bears witnessed the transformation first hand and it cost them the perfect season.
Bears are no longer perfect
It turns out that Bears will not be the first team since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers to remain unbeaten in search of a national championship. This does not mean that Baylor will still not be able to cut the nets in April, there is only a little more work to be done before that.
What happened to coach Scott Drew and Co. is exactly what they cannot allow to happen in the future.
Butler didn’t score his first points until 10 minutes into the second half, so he missed. Mitchell was unable to create his own shot. Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua did not register a single rebound. If it looked like a Baylor team that hadn’t played in weeks, maybe it was because it really is.
Due to the pandemic, Baylor had a series of rescheduled games that kept them out of the field from February 2 to February 23. A home game against Iowa State’s bottom spot last week may have helped the Bears prepare for Kansas. but it is clear that they were not the Bears at their best.
Perhaps with the pressure of an unbeaten record no longer on their shoulders, and with a defeat that exposed many flaws, the Bears can once again dominate their opponents. That was not the case on Saturday.
Instead, it felt more like a typical confrontation between Bill Self and Scott Drew: two talented teams fighting for the lead in the first half, only for Kansas to get away with the game in the final 20 minutes.
Either way, the Jayhawks made the Bears pay. With three games in the next 10 days, Baylor doesn’t have much time to think about why. He just needs to figure out how to get back to playing at the Final Four level that he kept until Saturday.
What is the next
Baylor faces a quick turnaround with a fight against No. 10 West Virginia in Morgantown on Tuesday at 5 pm ET, followed by a home game against Oklahoma State two days later in Waco. The Jayhawks, meanwhile, added a non-conference game against UTEP on Thursday at 8 pm ET, after Big 12 reconfigured its schedule due to the pandemic.