I Think About the Marquette Final Four Game Every Day
Hook it to my veins
The fact that this is still online is probably the only good remaining thing about the Internet
The year is 2003. The secondary break is in full swing, and Nick Collison is throwing up 30/12’s against quality competition. A young, meteoric star named Dwyane Wade just triple-double’d Kentucky. KU outlasted Arizona team that no one would shut up about in the Elite 8. Roy Williams is yet to not give a shit about North Carolina. Things are feeling good.
And then… this game. Right from the tip, the Jayhawks are flying around. Marquette gets in a whole so fast that even Wade can’t begin to erase the damage. KU takes a 20-16 lead and builds it out to 41-24. But they keep going. They get every offensive board. They get every second-chance point. It’s the whole late Williams period, crystallized: never would William’s motion system (god, so much motion, lol) look as good as this. If you didn’t have a viable strategy to slow it down, you’d get steamrolled.
Thanks to NCAA Vault’s handy YouTube edit, they’ve got this down to 68 minutes. I tend to remember the Williams era like this—I think about how many sun-scraping performances there were. The Jayhawks’ dominance put Williams in an uneasy position, especially when the inevitable failure happened. He left, and KU had to move on.
But before that, some basketball happened, and it was fun to watch. I’ll leave it at that.