Box Score By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider
            On a day when top-ranked Baylor was outrebounded, gave up 51 percent shooting from the field, missed the front end of three 1-and-1 situations and trailed by as many as 11, the Bears still had a shot at the end of the game. 
            Jared Butler, who willed his team back into the game, missed a 3-pointer from the top of the key that would have sent it into overtime. Instead, the Bears (24-2, 13-1) saw a Big 12-record 23-game winning streak come to an end with a 64-61 loss to the No. 3 Jayhawks Saturday afternoon at the Ferrell Center before a program record-tying sellout crowd of 10,627. 
            "It wasn't super wide open, but it was a good enough look," said Butler, who had a team-high 19 points and six assists to go with six rebounds and two steals. "I guess it wasn't supposed to go in, you know what I mean? But, I thought it was supposed to go in. . . . Even when we were down four or five, I had full confidence we were going to win the game. Sometimes, things just don't go your way."
            Trailing by seven after a pair of free throws by Devon Dotson with 32.3 seconds left, Baylor climbed back to within one on back-to-back 3-pointers by Butler and MaCio Teague, who returned to the lineup after missing the previous two games with a wrist injury. 
            "That shows you the heart of our team," Drew said. "Normally, when you're not playing well, you can hang your head. But, why we've been successful is our guys pick each other up, and one mistake doesn't lead to two because they care about their teammates."
            After Isaiah Moss hit a pair of free throws with 7.9 seconds left to put the Jayhawks (24-3, 13-1) back up by three, Butler dribbled it down to a last-second shot over Dotson that hit the front end of the rim as time expired. 
            "If you hit your free throws down the stretch, then it's a different situation," said Drew, whose team had not lost since falling to Washington, 67-64, on Nov. 8 in the Armed Forces Classic in Anchorage, Alaska. "Close games, that's why the free throw line is such a big part of it. . . . The other thing is normally when we miss free throws, we get a couple rebounds of those. Kansas did a good job blocking us out."
            The biggest difference between Baylor's 67-55 win at Allen Fieldhouse and Saturday's game was 7-footer Udoka Azubuike. Held to six points in the Jan. 11 game in Lawrence, Azubuike was 11-of-13 from the field and had a monster double-double with 23 points and 19 rebounds.  
            "We set a lot of side-ball screens the last time, and they kept him on the side and didn't force help," Kansas coach Bill Self said. "Today, we tried to change the angles a little bit. He was able to get a running start to the rim a few times."
            Most of Azubuike's 21 points came on rim-rattling dunks off alley oops and his five offensive boards. Baylor's defense just had no answer for him all day. 
            "The dude can rebound, finishes at the rim, and he does it really," said 6-9 Baylor senior forward Freddie Gillespie, who finished with 10 points, seven boards and two blocks. "I think our first game, we did a better job as a team keeping him out of his rhythm. This game, he was in sync."
            Kansas, which won its 12^th in a row, moved into a first-place tie in the Big 12 standings with Baylor. The Jayhawks had a string of 14-consecutive Big 12 championships snapped last year when Kansas State and Texas Tech shared it. 
            "The Big 12, the beauty of it is you have 18 games. Every one of them count the same," Drew said. "For us, the goal at the beginning of the eyar wasn't to sweep Kansas. The goal was to win a Big 12 championship. Their goal is to win a Big 12 championship. So, we've got to be ready to go Tuesday (against Kansas State). Hopefully, now that MaCio is back, we can start to get in a rhythm and a subbing pattern and start to develop that chemistry again."
            As the clear frontrunners in the league and two of the top five teams in the country, the expectation is that there could be a third and even fourth meeting this season. "And hopefully it's in the Final Four," Drew said. 
            Self, who came into the league 17 years ago with Drew, said this Baylor team is "the best team that we have played against since I've been in the league the last 17 years."
            "You can look at Oklahoma State in '04 and Texas Tech (last year). But, I think at the same stage, Baylor has played better than both of those teams," Self said. "I don't know it's going to finish, but I certainly feel pretty strongly about that. We're not the most visually attractive team to watch at times, but we've got a nice squad. It speaks well for our league to have two teams that have done so well at the top of it."
            Baylor, which ended the first half on a 6-0 run to pull back within 34-31 at the break, also got 10 points from Matthew Mayer, eight from Teague and six points and eight rebounds from Mark Vital. 
            Dotson (13) and Moss (11) both scored in double figures for the Jayhawks, who edged the Bears on the boards, 34-32, and had a 42-30 edge on points in the paint. 
            "As a competitor, I want to play them again, 100 percent," Butler said. "But, Kansas doesn't rule my life. I want to win a Big 12 championship. The goal wasn't to sweep Kansas, it was to win a Big 12 championship."
            Baylor stays at home to host Kansas State (9-18, 2-12) at 7 p.m. Tuesday. The Wildcats lost their seventh in a row on Saturday, falling 70-59 at home to Texas.