New basketball book builds unsteady monuments to Kansas basketball and other teams 

Sports fans love lists. Top NCAA players by rebounds. Top college basketball programs by Final Four appearances. The only teams to finish a season with an undefeated record.

If you list it, they will come.

This sports trivia appetite suggests a new college basketball book, “The Magnificent Seven: College Basketball’s Blue Bloods,” should be a hit upon its release, just in time for the NCAA Tournament, which started Thursday.

However, the authors, Mark Mehler and Jeff Tiberii, create what might be an impossible task for themselves: build a castle for these wildly winning teams at a time when a cresting wave is threatening them all — if it hasn’t already battered some beyond repair. Add to that decades of team history for seven different programs with enough depth to satisfy ardent fans, folks who know even the most arcane stats and otherwise-forgotten benchwarmers.

What emerges from their book is a chatty and light read that builds statues to college coaches, a group that deserves quite a bit of skepticism, and treats these seven programs with more reverence than they deserve. “Magnificent Seven” is best when it interrogates the politics of the time and the team cultures that coaches created. 

However, those weighty topics blend awkwardly with the language of the book, which is peppered with sportswriter cliches and goofy metaphors. For instance, about former University of Kansas coach Larry Brown:

Which brings us to the second irrefutable fact in the basketball odyssey of Larry Brown, which can perhaps best be illustrated in the lexicon of the early-twentieth century Wild West fiction writer. 

Larry Brown was “fiddle-footed.”

He made his gun-slinging reputation by riding into town and cleaning up a mess (often leaving another mess behind). 

Since you might be here for the list, here are the seven programs that the authors chose: Duke, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina and the upstart of the bunch, the University of Connecticut, which has won six titles since 1999. Kansas earns a place by winning the minimum of national championships (four) required to be in the book (compared with 11 for UCLA).

The book’s introduction illustrates how dominant these “beauties” have been: These seven schools have won more than half of the tournaments since 1939. They have also won the past three.

“The ongoing success of these seven programs highlights an oft-neglected aspect of the NCAA Tournament,” they write. “Beneath all the unpredictable zaniness of mid-March, there lies an equally thick layer of normality and sanity that fully reveals itself in early April.”

This truism about the last few decades may be on the brink of breaking down, though. Players this season earned millions of dollars for name, image and likeness payments, unsettling the economics of college sports. Entire Division I basketball rosters collapsed as players fled for playing time at other programs through the transfer portal. College basketball has morphed into a professional workplace.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect “The Magnificent Seven,” which is largely a history book, to reckon with these recent realities. The timing also might suggest that this is the perfect time to interrogate these changes.

The authors might have tried to answer how these seven teams will cope with an upside-down ecosystem of college sports. The book could more directly encounter the possibility that college sports, and especially college basketball, have been radically changed by money.

Cracks in these programs might already be showing. Consider the past three years for these seven schools, when compared to a three-year span at the turn of the 21st century. From 1999 to 2001, these seven schools were the undisputed marquee of the sport: Only one school did not qualify for the tournament during this span (UConn in 2001). Entering the 1999 tournament, each team qualified at no worse than a No. 6 seed.

The past few years signal a slide. During the past three years, four teams from three different schools fell short of the tournament (UCLA, North Carolina and Indiana twice). Even with the group winning the past three tournaments, these teams look less than usually magnificent this season, with seeds of No. 11, No. 9 and two No. 7s.

Mehler and Tiberii, both veteran sports journalists, write vibrantly about the racial issues that have surrounded the Kansas team for decades. Their explanation of the basics of Quantrill’s Raid at the start of the chapter transitions into the realities of living in Lawrence as a Black man during segregation — whether the poet Langston Hughes or the legend Wilt Chamberlain.

Pulled from reporting in Sports Illustrated, anecdotes explain why coach Dick Harp may have quit his job following racial abuse for playing and recruiting Black men. Race compellingly frames the Kansas chapter, even if it eventually gives way to smaller matters, such as tactical discussions of coach Ted Owens’s recruiting choices. 

At times, “The Magnificent Seven” reads a bit more like a book report than a deeply researched original volume. Mehler and Tiberii list the interviews that fuel each chapter, and one chapter (sorry, Kentucky) relied on only five interviews. The quick pace of the chapters, with 30 pages covering almost a century of games and thousands of KU wins, also demands that only the most central players and coaches earn mentions.

Largely, the book provides a nostalgic look at a bygone version of college basketball, often sliding into sports cliche, if not architectural hagiography.

“The evidence lies in the warmth inside Cameron Indoor Stadium on cold January nights, and the smell of a bonfire raging on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill after a big Tar Heel win. Or the deafening roar of the invading horde of Huskie faithful at a Big East Conference Tourney final, rocking Madison Square Garden with endless chants of “UCONN, UCONN, UCONN!”

During the end of the book’s introduction, the authors try to explain how “institutional memory” helps to differentiate these seven teams from the rest of college basketball.

“Very simply stated,” they write, “it’s the history of a program, embedded in all that has been written and observed over the decades. It’s lodged in the memories and experiences of former players and coaches who remain lifelong program fixtures and living symbols of what was once great and could be again.”

While those words could easily define “institutional memory,” they could also define the past era of college basketball, when the best teams this year were the best teams from the previous year.

In 10 years will we look at these programs as the continued, unrivaled standouts of college basketball? Or will we see them as the outdated vestiges of an antiquated era, now resigned to a history book?

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.