We Are The Champions!!

Today was a terrific day. Our Kansas Jayhawks played an amazing game today against the University of Texas. This one was for all the marbles--a win would give us the outright Big 12 regular season title...a loss would leave us with only a share of the championship. I was nervous for 2 days prior to the game!

Since we don't have KU basketball season tickets, we went to the next best place in town to watch--our favorite restaurant, Set'em Up Jack's. I love watching games there! They have at least 7 big screen TVs, including a 22 foot HD screen that covers an entire wall, so there's not a bad seat in the house. The food and service are always good, and the place is always packed with tons of rowdy fans. Patrons clap, cheer, whistle and scream with reckless abandon, decked out in their KU gear in support of Bill's Boys. I call it Allen Fieldhouse East--it's just the most fun place to be if you can't actually be at the game!

So today we met friends at Jack's for the 11:00 a.m. tipoff, and it was so much fun! The 'Hawks started strong, but the Longhorn's incredible 3-point shooting quickly led to a KU deficit. Kansas was behind by 16 points late in the first half, even though they weren't really playing that badly! If you don't count their last second "Hail Mary," Texas shot 11 for 13 from 3-point range in the first half! It was crazy! Even though we were still down by 12 points at halftime, we weren't too terribly worried, because we knew that UT couldn't keep that pace up forever!

In the second half, the 'Hawks came out hot, and scored like 22 points in the first five minutes. The crowd at Jack's was going nuts, so I decided to pull out the camera, and I started recording just as KU took it's first lead since early in the game. You can see how great the TV setup is, as well as how fun the crowd is!



Our Jayhawks kept up their intense play for almost the entire second half, with very impressive performances by Julian Wright and Mario Chalmers. Sasha Kaun was the only one of our starters that didn't score in double figures, and he had 9 points and 5 rebounds, so he was still a big contributor. We were up by as many as 10 or 12 points in the second half, and even when Texas cut it to 3 in the final seconds, the 'Hawks held on to win, 90-86, in a nail biter. Jack's was rocking almost as much as Allen Fieldhouse and was so much fun!

Check out the complete synopsis of the game from the Lawrence Journal-World. What a great way to start March Madness!!