Savion Flowers hit a walk-off solo home run in the bottom of the tenth inning Thursday afternoon in Surprise, and Kansas is still alive in its pursuit of the program's first Big 12 tournament title since 1949.
The sequence that produced it was the kind of thing tournament baseball manufactures. Kansas led Baylor 7-5 going into the ninth. Two outs from advancing. Then Baylor hit a two-run single — the game tied, the season that Kansas has been building all year suddenly on a knife's edge. Boede Rahe worked a clean tenth for the Jayhawks, sat down the side, and gave Flowers a chance to end it. He did.
Oklahoma State didn't need theatrics. The Cowboys beat UCF 12-6 in the other quarterfinal, and the efficiency of it was the point. UCF spent most of this Big 12 season as a legitimate contender, and Oklahoma State ran them out of the bracket without a moment of extended suspense. That's what you want heading into a semifinal.
Those two teams play each other Friday afternoon. Our model makes Oklahoma State the 61.6 percent favorite — a meaningful gap, not a coin flip. Kansas was supposed to be here as the Big 12's landmark team: a program that has never hosted a regional, has never won a modern-era conference title, and has spent two months being the best team in a league no one expected them to lead. They arrive in that semifinal as the underdog after needing extra innings to get there.
The other half of the bracket is West Virginia against Arizona State. Arizona State carries Landon Hairston, the sophomore slugger we wrote about in April when he was hitting .444 with 23 home runs through 40 games and running away from every individual category in the sport. The Big 12 semifinal is a different stage than a midweek game in Tempe, but Hairston's presence in any lineup changes what pitchers have to manage. West Virginia enters as a slight favorite — the kind of team that grinds and strings together runs, the kind that tends to stay dangerous in single-elimination baseball.
What Kansas did on Thursday was survive. What happens Friday will tell us whether surviving was enough.