The drawl vs the traitor.
Roy Williams
It wasn't that he won, even though he did. After all, Bill Self has beaten Mizzou at an even higher rate and won the national title that eluded Williams in Lawrence, and he didn't make this bracket. (He almost did, but that's not the point.) Really, it was the aw-shucks personality. The fact that he talked like Deputy Dawg and built the reputation of being one of the best people in college basketball while allegedly doing some pretty negative recruiting behind the scenes. And let's face it, even if he was not guilty of any negative tactics ... the more bulletproof your character is, the more rival fans will attempt to shoot bullets through it. Mizzou hated Roy Williams because, unlike with Billy Tubbs, Danny Nee or others, they weren't given the high road. They couldn't hate him because he was a jerk, they could just hate him because a really, really successful Kansas coach. Which, it turns out, was enough to get him into this bracket.
Ryan Robertson
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
For four years, every time Ryan Robertson touched the ball inside the Hearnes Center's walls, the Mizzou home crowd let him have it. The St. Charles West product spurned his home state school to play for the hated Jayhawks, and even though his team had little to no success at Hearnes in this time (Kansas beat Mizzou his senior year, and he taunted the student section after the game ... then Kansas turned right around and lost to Mizzou at Allen Fieldhouse), the hatred never did subside. Robertson was a reasonably successful player, averaging 7.4 points per game for his career, but success and hatred do not always have a direct correlation.