Under the rules of the day, the NCAA champion immediately entered the Olympic playoffs. Four days after winning the crown in Seattle, KU downed NAIA champ Southwest Missouri State in Kansas City. The next day, the Jayhawks jetted to New York City, where they dropped LaSalle, the NIT champion, in the semifinals. A win in the finals would have sent Kansas' team to the Olympics to represent the United States. Still, Allen was invited to become an Olympic assistant, and seven Jayhawks joined the U.S. team, which won the gold in Helsinki.
Times are different now.
The game is different now. The 1952 Jayhawks averaged 71.2 points a game, far and away the biggest numbers in school history but far fewer than the any number of teams of the last 20 years. Other Kansas teams have posted larger margins of victory and more overall wins. The 1988 team, in one of the NCAA tournament's greatest upsets, weathered 11 losses to win another championship. But over the first 99 years of Kansas basketball, no other can match the 1951-52 Jayhawks' cumulative accomplishments.