By Mac Engel
tengel@star-telegram.com
FORT WORTH -- The security guard wearing the yellow shirt needed a cane for assistance, but he tried like hell to make sure those darned students were not going to be able to rush the court.
Fortunately, the TCU students found a different route to run past his misplaced efforts to storm the floor with their friends and celebrate the Horned Frogs' first home win in the Big 12 conference revenue sports.
TCU 62, No. 5 Kansas 55.
You won't believe this, but the Horned Frogs never trailed.
Call it one of the top three biggest upsets in college basketball this season, and easily the biggest win in school history. TCU had been 0-for-20 against top 5 teams until Wednesday night.
What the TCU football team could not do - win a conference home game - the men's basketball did. Only took 'til February.
The game itself was epically ugly, but the moment was wonderfully innocent fun for a program that has had precious few over these last few decades. These are the games you never see in the NBA, and a swift-kick reminder of the maddening unpredictability of youth.
KU was favored by 18.5 points, which just begged for heavy action.
Kansas played terrible, but TCU deserved to win.
It was a well-deserved moment for first-year coach Trent Johnson, and a team that has tried hard all season but been out-manned against Big 12 talent.
Hell, this team barely beat Prairie View.
TCU senior forward Garlon Greene has not had many of these since he arrived in Fort Worth, but for the rest of his life he will be able to tell his friends and family he beat Kansas.
"It means a lot. We've had tough years," said Green, who scored a game-high 20 points. "We're having a tough year right now. This is a big win."
Even former TCU head coach Jim Christian, who is now at Ohio University, caught the game. He followed it on his team's bus.
"Happy for those kids," he texted.
The one who did not look happy, but insisted he was, was the head coach himself.
Johnson looked like someone just shot his dog.
"I'm happy," Johnson said. "I've got a lot of respect for the team we just beat."
Johnson has been around long enough that he knows the score - these things sometimes just happen. He knows his team played hard and played well, but they also had help.
This is not a back-handed shot at TCU, which played sound defense throughout, but what Kansas did offensively redefined bad.
With 6:19 remaining in the first half, KU had two points.
"It's the worst team Kansas has ever put on the floor since Dr. Naismith; I think he lost to the YMCA," KU head coach Bill Self said. "For the first half there hasn't been a team play worse than that offensively. Anywhere."
By the time KU started to play better in the second half, it was too late. TCU believed it could win, and was out-playing the Jayhawks.
Every time KU looked like it found its game, TCU made a play to quiet the pro-Jayhawk crowd that filled Daniel-Meyer Coliseum.
The missed shots for Kansas would not stop; the Jayhawks shot 3-of-22 from 3-point range.
KU's constant misses offset the 16 missed free throws by TCU.
Often times the game was a battle of "Whatever you miss, I can miss better."
Johnson managed and coached the game as well as a man could; he called timeouts to stop any sense of momentum loss. How he kept point guard Kyan Anderson in the game with four fouls required constant juggling.
With five minutes remaining, word was spreading on campus that TCU might pull this off and suddenly more students appeared.
Even with an eight-point lead with 42 seconds, no one thought this game was in the bag. Johnson said he thought his team had it won with eight seconds remaining, when his team was up by nine.
When it was over the students rushed the floor for one of those scenes only college sports can provide.
It was spontaneous, fun, and well earned ... particularly for those who had to run around that security guard.
Mac Engel, 817-390-7697Twitter: @MacEngelProf
Looking for comments?
