King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Memphis can't buy a free throw, Chalmers hits an epic three-pointer and Kansas wins the NCAA Tournament.

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April 8, 2008 | When it comes to the endgame in college basketball, there are two ways to do it. You can make your free throws or you can make your three-pointers. Memphis had a nine-point lead with 2:12 to go in the NCAA Championship Game Monday night but missed four of five free throws down the stretch.

That -- and a strategic blunder -- left the door open for Kansas. Mario Chalmers nailed a game-tying three for the history books with 2.1 seconds to go. That's the other way to go. His shot over the tough defense of Derrick Rose, a shot that by this time next year will have a name everyone in Kansas knows, sent the game to overtime.

Memphis, demoralized, exhausted and without the defensive presence of forward Joey Dorsey, who had fouled out, was run off the floor in the extra session. Kansas won the game 75-68 for its first title in 20 years.

"It wasn't really the free throws," Rose said after the game. Except, yeah, it was.

The sequence actually started with the Tigers making free throws. Robert Dozier hit a pair to give Memphis that nine-point lead at 60-51 and Chris Douglas-Roberts made a pair with 1:39 to go that restored the lead to six, 62-56, following a 5-0 run by the Jayhawks.

Three-fifths of that run consisted of a spectacular play by Sherron Collins that will be mostly forgotten because of Chalmers' shot, but it kept Kansas in the game. Memphis led 60-53 and was inbounding on the backcourt baseline with 1:54 to go. Collins stepped in front of Rose and stole the pass, somehow hanging in the air long enough to pass the ball to Mario Chalmers before Collins landed out of bounds.

Chalmers drove the lane but got caught in traffic underneath the basket. He dumped the ball off to Russell Robinson, who'd been trying to box out for a rebound. Robinson initially fumbled it, then threw it out to Collins, who was wide open in the right corner. Collins buried the three to bring Kansas to within four.

After Douglas-Roberts' free throws had built the lead back up to six, Dorsey fouled out by bumping Chalmers on the dribble about a mile from the basket. Not a Phi Beta Kappa play. Chalmers hit both free throws, and then the Jayhawks fouled Douglas-Roberts and that was the beginning of the end for Memphis.

Shooting a one-and-one with 1:15 left and a four-point lead, Douglas-Roberts missed. Kansas pulled to within two on Darrell Arthur's turnaround jumper from the low post -- where Dorsey was absent -- and then after a timeout came something you almost never see in the last minute of a close college basketball game:

Basketball. As in exciting, end-to-end action, and I don't mean end-to-end as in everybody trudging from one foul line to the other.

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