LAWRENCE, Kan. — Scott Drew thought about it. He really did.
A few minutes after his team’s brutally narrow 73-68 loss at Kansas, his 10th there in his 14-year career at Baylor — one more, it should be noted, than Bill Self, who moved to 218-9 Wednesday night — Drew was asked what made it so difficult to win at Allen Fieldhouse.
Drew paused. He let the awkward silence hang — one second, two, three. For a brief moment, it appeared a deeply frustrated coach was going to cross the professional rubicon, say what he really felt, bring what he had been openly telling the officials on the sideline all night into the forbidden realm of the postgame news conference.
Oh, I don’t know, maybe because they shot 27 free throws and we shot six? Because Kansas was called for 10 fouls in 67 possessions in a close game, and we were called for 21? Because it’s hard to play five on eight?
“Hmm,” Drew said, breaking the silence, and rarely was a solitary syllable so drenched in sarcasm. He’d won the battle over himself. He could safely move forward.
“Well, they have a great crowd,” he said. “The energy … everybody feeds off the home crowd. That’s why it’s so tough to win on the road.”
Both the said and the unsaid were right. Kansas is Dark Souls-hard to beat at home because the crowd feeds off the players and the players feed off the crowd, a cycle of input and output flowing and accelerating for 40 minutes. The result is an insane, impossible maelstrom that can’t help but seep into every aspect of every game played within (officiating included).
Or, put more simply: Allen Fieldhouse is great because the players are great. And vice versa.
“There’s a serious level of confidence that, no matter what the situation is late game, a guy will make a play,” Self said. “A lot of people claim they have it, and I’m sure they do, but I don’t know that anybody’s got what we got. That’s a ridiculously great home court.”
It was in especially rare form Wednesday night. Fans were already packing the Phog’s old-school painted bleachers a half-hour before tipoff. During pregame warmups, the public address system made multiple announcements asking the students, who had long since sprinted to their first-come, first-serve sections, to “squeeze tight” and make room for every paying customer. Fifteen minutes before tip, two KU fans walked in to find their own and marveled at how full the gym already was.
Wednesday night’s game was just the second matchup of top-three teams in Big 12 history. The first came last season, and the three-overtime Jayhawks win over Oklahoma and Buddy Hield (who poured in 46 points and earned a late standing ovation from the opposing fans) was an instant classic.
The 2017 version carried similar weight. Baylor arrived enjoying a rare rankings superiority to the Jayhawks, an equal share of first place in the Big 12 at 7-1, and as good a shot as any team in recent seasons of ending the Jayhawks’ 12-year conference title streak — not to mention their 50-game home winning streak.
For whole swaths of the game, it appeared the Bears would do exactly that. Johnathan Motley, All-American candidate/athletic human outlier, dominated the first half with 14 points on 6-of-10 shooting, along with six rebounds. Motley’s ability to post like a big, stretch the floor and drive presented the toughest matchup of the season for the undermanned Jayhawks’ frontcourt; even when he was well-defended, his shots fell in. He and the rest of the Bears seemed to rebound nearly every shot that didn’t. They took a 34-28 lead into the half.
When the Jayhawks came out of the halftime locker room, they weren’t greeted by an anxious, nail-biting reception. All they heard was noise. And so they flew out to a 13-2 run shortly after halftime, led by freshman star Josh Jackson.
No one was more important to the win than Jackson, the highly touted future lottery pick whose solid work early in the season has since given way to frequent star turns. Jackson made a 3 in that Jayhawks run, the element of his game he struggled with most upon arrival and the one that makes him lethal on the offensive end.
With less than three minutes to play — after Manu Lecomte’s quick-twitch 3s had kept the Bears in the game and Kansas had switched in and out of zone defense, had big-to-big doubled Motley out of the game, and Frank Mason had gotten to the free throw line over and over (much to Drew’s chagrin) plus a dozen other back-and-forth mini-swings — Jackson used his newfound outside threat to fake his defender, drive baseline and finish with two hands at the rim. Kansas went ahead 66-64 and wouldn’t surrender the lead the rest of the night.
“That was a big, big basket,” Self said. “Maybe the biggest of the game.”
It was, in other words, that big play that Kansas is so confident someone will make. That confidence is well-placed, because Jackson is a big-time player, no less so than Mason, Devonte’ Graham, Sviatoslav Mykhailiuk, and so on. But the confidence also exists because Allen Fieldhouse infuses the Jayhawks with so much energy, and has hosted so much precedent, that it would be ludicrous to think otherwise.
A bit later, when there was nothing but an inbounds pass and an inevitable pair of free throws until the game was officially out of reach, Baylor called a final, last-ditch timeout. The whistle ostensibly blew, though there was no aural evidence to prove it. Still, the Baylor players walked back toward the bench. As they did, Landen Lucas, Mason and the rest of the Jayhawks looked up at the Allen Fieldhouse stands and raised their arms up and down, speaking in universal signs: louder.
And Allen Fieldhouse got louder.
“One day we’ll win up here,” Drew said. “Just not this year.”
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