Kansas

DENVER - If this year's NCAA tournament was lacking for frantic last-second finishes and overtime struggles, the semifinals of the West Regional at McNichols Arena last night took care of that.Playing the role of featured heavyweights, Kansas and Arizona each threw potential knockout punches at one another. Both got up off the floor, until the Jayhawks knocked the Wildcats out of the tournament for good.Kansas scored seven straight points down the stretch, including a three-point shot by senior guard Jerod Haase with 35.9 seconds to go, to lift the second-seeded Jayhawks past the third-seeded Wildcats, 83-80.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The shots fell for Kansas right from the start. From inside the lane, from outside the three-point line. Layups off steals, jumpers off screens, stick-backs off offensive rebounds.The Jayhawks, efficient on offense and relentless on defense, poured it on Indiana in the first half of last night's second Southeast Regional semifinal game of the National Collegiate TC Athletic Association tournament. The Hoosiers never recovered.In one of the most awesome displays by Kansas this season, and one of the most awful defensive showings by Indiana, the third-seeded Jayhawks crushed the second-seeded and favored Hoosiers, 83-65, before 23,287 at Charlotte Coliseum.

What: NCAA Midwest Regional semifinalWhere: Kemper Arena, Kansas City, Mo.When: Tonight, approximately 10:30TV: Channels 13, 9.How they got there: Kansas beat Colgate, 82-68, and Western Kentucky, 75-70; Virginia beat Nicholls State, 96-72, and Miami of Ohio, 60-54, in OT.Outlook: The two schools never have met, but Jeff Jones and Roy Williams are familiar from their days as assistant coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Cavaliers give away a considerable amount of height in the paint, and if senior C Junior Burrough gets in foul trouble against the rotation of 7-2 Greg Ostertag, 6-11 Raef LaFrentz and 6-10 Scot Pollard, Virginia doesn't figure to last long.

Now that Maryland has visited the Land of Oz, the Terps get a look at Kansas.Coach Gary Williams is still ruing Thursday's overtime loss at Clemson, in the earliest Atlantic Coast Conference game in Maryland history. The Terps displayed courage and heart that the Lion and Tin Man would have appreciated, but like the Scarecrow, they were sometimes in search of a brain.Maryland (3-2), which is ranked No. 23, must forget the opportunity it wasted, and step up its play against No. 2 Kansas (8-0)

CHICAGO -- They have played six games and flown thousands of miles, and still have another long leg left in their early-season adventure.Just when it seemed as if the top-ranked Kansas Jayhawks had run out of gas last night here at the United Center, they found a second wind against fourth-ranked Cincinnati in the Great Eight Festival.More importantly, they found a way of stopping Danny Fortson. Or, perhaps, the senior All-American found a way of stopping himself. When the 6-foot-7 forward got into foul trouble early in the second half, the Jayhawks got into the game.

EVEREST, Kan. - Kevin Compton, a 48-year-old farmer, recently walked in his cornfield to inspect the damage from a summer-long drought. He tore open an ear of corn and grimaced. "Look at this little bitty ear," he said, revealing a stunted, partly rotted corn cob. "This won't amount to nothing. Everything's gone." Compton then hopped in his Ford Explorer and drove a mile east to inspect some soybean acreage. It was even worse. "You see these spots?" he said, fingering a withering, pale-green soybean pod. "These are dying.

DAYTON, Ohio -- More than 25 years ago, Don Haskins took a bunch of big-city players and little Texas Western to the top of the college basketball world. When the Miners beat Kentucky at Cole Field House in the final of the 1966 NCAA tournament, many considered it the biggest upset in the history of the sport.Yesterday's 66-60 win over top-seeded, fourth-ranked Kansas by the same school -- now Texas-El Paso -- and the same coach might not have been of the same proportions, but it was enough to throw the already wide-open NCAA Midwest Regional into chaos.

WASHINGTON -- Raef La Frentz scored 25 points and Billy Thomas scored 15 last night, leading Kansas to an 89-71 victory over Pennsylvania in the consolation game of the Franklin National Bank Classic at the MCI Center.The win allowed the third-ranked Jayhawks to leave the nation's capital with a better taste in their mouth, bouncing back from Sunday's upset loss to Maryland."We were very disappointed not to be playing in the championship game and somewhat embarrassed," said LaFrentz. "It's not the most fun situation to play in, but it was something we had to do, and we wanted to come out and make a good showing in the consolation game."

SAN ANTONIO -- Sometimes a tie isn't a tie, but a loss. Thus it was at the Alamodome last night, when the first overtime in the national championship game in 11 years tipped off. The score was 63-63. But Memphis had lost. Kansas had already won, and the only question remaining in the final five minutes was how much the final margin would be. And whether this was as much of a miracle, as much an astoundingly unexpected event for the program than its last national title 20 years earlier.

TOPEKA, Kan. -- In a one-room office leased from a law firm in the Jayhawk Building here, a couple of young eager beavers operating on a $15,000 budget are busy plotting the final indignity to Bob Dole -- his defeat in his own home state of Kansas on November 5.It probably won't happen, but they're persevering with the hope of a pair of two-dollar bettors plunking their deuces down on a 100-to-1 shot. Troy Findley, 32, and Joe Wagner, 27, have been laboring from their cubbyhole since early September on what surely seems to be a fool's errand.