Roy arrived at KU a year before I did. Like a lot of people, when he was announced as the new coach in October 1988 I was confused that it wasn\u2019t Gary Williams of Ohio State who was being introduced. \u201cWho the hell is ROY Williams?\u201d was the common refrain. His first year KU struggled under the weight of NCAA sanctions. But my freshman year he beat #2 LSU and #1 UNLV back-to-back in November, hung 150 on Kentucky in December<\/a>, and led KU to its first #1 ranking in 30 years in January. I quickly joined the rest of the KU student section in chanting \u201cRoy, Roy, Roy!\u201d each time he entered the court from the locker room. <\/p>\n My sophomore year he coached a team that lost in the national championship game.<\/p>\n Two years later he got back to the Final Four.<\/p>\n Then things really got rolling. He started cleaning up in recruiting, bringing in Jacque Vaughn, Scot Pollard, Jerod Haase, Raef LaFrentz, Billy Thomas, and Paul Pierce over a three-year span. That group was the core of likely his best team, the 1997 team that lost just once in the regular season – in double overtime on a last-second shot off a loose ball in a classic game at Missouri – before laying an absolute egg against the eventual national champions Arizona in the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n The next year he had two first team All-Americans in LaFrentz and Pierce, but couldn\u2019t survive the first weekend.<\/p>\n This was when he started to annoy KU fans. His skin got thinner. He acted like he was the only one who hurt when KU lost. He publicly said he would never recruit a player that North Carolina was also recruiting. After finishing second to Syracuse for New York native John Wallace, he said he would never recruit anyone from the east coast again because there were \u201ctoo many schools to recruit against.\u201d He blasted the KU students for not filling the stands one night against a 7th or 8th place Big 8 team when there were two huge midterms sucking up freshmen and sophomores, then publicly flirted with Tennessee who had just fired their coach. And there was the crying when his teams lost in March, and the insistence that \u201cno other coach could be prouder of their team than I am of mine.\u201d<\/p>\n And that\u2019s just the stuff I can remember.<\/p>\n In the spring of 2000 I sent an email to some friends saying I would be fine if Roy left. I was tired of all the weirdness of his personality which I thought distracted from the team and their success. When Dean Smith retired a couple months later I was sweating it big time, and cheered with everyone else who raced to Memorial Stadium to watch him say \u201cI\u2019m stayin\u2019!<\/a>\u201d He had a crop of great young players – Nick Collison, Drew Gooden, Kirk Hinrich, Jeff Boschee – and the removal of the lure of Carolina would surely mean he would face no more questions about leaving KU.<\/p>\n The next March he lost to Bill Self\u2019s Illinois team in the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n The 2002 team was another of his very best, a squad that was perhaps the most perfect team he ever coached, filled with shooters and numerous ball-handlers and slashing athletes and multiple big men who were damn-near impossible to stop. That team lost to a Maryland team that was on a mission in the Final Four.<\/p>\n A year later Collison put the team on his back and they returned to the Final Four. The Monday of Final Four week North Carolina fired Matt Doherty and, suddenly, the college basketball world was focused on the certainty that UNC would hire Roy the day after KU\u2019s final game.<\/p>\n What was a distraction to fans apparently wasn\u2019t to the team, which absolutely destroyed Marquette in the national semifinal. But Roy\u2019s stubbornness may have cost them a national title when he waited until KU was down 20 in the first half to put his best defender, Hinrich, on Gerry McNamara, who hit five 3\u2019s. A furious comeback fell short because of missed free throws and an epic block by Hakim Warik. In the aftermath, Roy told Bonnie Bernstein, and the world, \u201cI could give a shit about North Carolina right now.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n A week later he was the Tar Heels\u2019 new coach.<\/p>\n Most KU fans were pissed, for a variety of reasons. My view was that everyone in basketball knew Doherty was getting fired and UNC would make a hard push for Roy. Roy knew what was going on just as well as we did. He could have made one call, to Dean Smith, and said, \u201cPlease, tell them to wait one week. Let me coach my team without this over my head,\u201d and I think that would have been enough to delay things. I felt that by not doing that, he took the focus off his team and made it about him. I don\u2019t think he wanted the attention to be on him. I just think he was so stubborn that he felt, \u201cThis is dumb, people shouldn\u2019t be talking about it,\u201d and honestly believed that the media would follow his thinking rather than the story. The questions about his future still would have been there. But they would not have been THE topic of the week, with that terrific 2003 team getting the bulk of the attention.<\/p>\n Would that have changed the result on that Monday in New Orleans? We\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n It was a strange dynamic between KU fans and Roy the next few years. We loved Bill Self, but as his first few teams struggled to figure out his system as Roy\u2019s players cycled out, and Roy finally won a title in 2005, it was hard not to feel like we got the lessor in the exchange. Maybe it wasn\u2019t Roy\u2019s issues that kept KU from winning a title in his 15 years, maybe it was something about Kansas. Back-to-back first round losses in 2005 and 2006 made those comparisons worse. For some reason a lot of us used that as fuel to hate Roy more. As if the drama of his departure played a bigger role in KU’s relative struggles than the normal growing pains that come when a new coach steps in.<\/p>\n
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