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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2011
MEN'S BASKETBALL
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Recalling memorable events from 2008
Tyrel Reed reflects on heartbreaking losses to Kansas State, Texas and Oklahoma State and an important team meeting
In today's excerpt, Tyrel talks about his freshman year, the march to the 2008 Final Four and a players-only meeting that changed a season and lifting the "Final Four Monkey" off his coach's back.
Our first big road test that year
"official" about this meeting. It was just sort of like, "Hey, we're going to Henry T's," and everybody showed up.
I imagine the other people in the restaurant were pretty curious about all this. Because we all have different schedules, it's pretty rare
16. Which put us in the Elite Eight, where we had lost the year before, against Davidson, who was everybody's Cinderella story.
As much as you try to ignore everything, there are certain facts that people just won't let you forget. We never guess that.
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for us, especially Darnell. He had been through a lot of tragedies already in his life, and his cousin had been killed earlier in the week. Sherron was hurt too, and didn't play much (11 minutes).
That loss shook us up a little bit.
We realized we weren't invincible, and one of the outcomes was the realization some things needed to be said, some things needed to be heard and we needed to sort it all out as a team. The manifestation of this was that some guys on the team — I can't remember who — decided we ought to go to Henry T's for dinner as a team, an event which I am now aware has taken on something of a legendary quality. I assume this is at least partially because nobody outside the team knows exactly what happened there, except that we never lost again that season.
So here's the story; Henry T's is a sports bar known for its wings and burgers. It has one extra large booth in one of the corners, which suited us fine. There was nothing
bigger target for our fans than he already was (which was pretty big).
Kansas got up by 24 in the second half and won 88-74.
We had one more chance for a revenge game that year, and it came in the Big 12 championship game against Texas. The memorable thing about that game was how well both teams played. It was almost surreal to watch. If you're a basketball fan, that had to be fun to watch because of the pure skill and talent on display. That's one of the better halves of basketball that I've witnessed.
The NCAA Tournament is a totally different animal from the regular season. You get funky game times; you don't know who you're going to play. It's weird. The stands are often half full and even the half that is there is a mix of a few different teams' fans.
We played Portland State in the first round. Then we had a nice game against UNLV and whipped Villanova pretty hard in the Sweet
overtaking
him at that time. I can only imagine coaching in college basketball for so long and coming so close. You're so defined by that last game in college. I think we need to be held accountable for losing in the NCAA Tournament, but we try not to let it define us as a team. Things happen. It's tough when people say we had a bad season. You wish it wouldn't be that way, that you went 35-3 but didn't have a good year. I think at a lot of places that would be a pretty good year.
The Davidson win was really a pressure release in a lot of ways. I felt like once we got to the Final Four, there was a sense of calmness.
© Reed All About It:
Driven to be a Jayhawk
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