A year ago, Kelvin Sampson was asked as his Oklahoma Sooners prepared for their West Regional final if he knew when spring football practice started.

Sampson knew the date; more importantly, he knew what the question implied -- that winning the national championship would be big news back home for a day, and then it would be back, in newspaper parlance, "below the fold."

	T.J. Ford and the Longhorns are trying to make Austin fans forget football for a while longer.

Someone will ask Rick Barnes the same thing this week, hoping to get the same kind of decisive candor that Sampson delivered so readily. Barnes is the head basketball coach at the University of Texas, the last best team standing if you believe in the sanctity of bracketology and one of four equals (with Syracuse, Kansas and Marquette) if you believe in the purity of competition.

But it's never that easy, especially in the coach-driven world of college hoops. Barnes is a sort of crypto-outsider, a basketball lifer well respected within the fraternity but without either the long basketball tradition behind him (like at Syracuse, Marquette or Kansas), the readily identifiable what-does-this-mean-for-his-reputation (like with Jim Boeheim or Roy Williams), the where-will-he-coach-next degradation (like with Tom Crean), or the football question, which he will have to field alone.

Barnes, though, will soldier on, because Texas is not a job a basketball coach takes lightly. It has its severe expectations, but it isn't Kansas. It has its football monolith, but it isn't Nebraska. And it has a coach who has not yet mastered the art of image-making.

In fact, you have to think hard about Barnes. You remember his great angry set-to with Mike Krzyzewski when he was at Clemson a few years ago, and you may have pigeonholed him as a hotheaded tin dictator in an industry full of them.

But the Barnes of now is not that Barnes. He has learned that what drove you on the way up can only get in your way the closer you get to the top. He has tempered his competitive impulses. He isn't looking to prove that he is better than Coach X, or that he will insist upon the prerogatives normally bestowed on Program Y.

He does, on the other hand, want to show his is the best team in college basketball right now, and that being the second best show on his own campus can be good enough.

Of course, it isn't that easy. Only one of the past 40 national champions -- Michigan in 1989 -- came from a traditional football power, although we are willing to allow for the possibility of putting an asterisk next to Michigan State in 1979 and 2000.

There are almost surely economic reasons for this, and there may be logistic, emotional and even karmic reasons for it as well, but the fact remains the same. Barnes is trying to do with this team what almost nobody has ever done, at least not since Steve Fisher fell into the 1989 title.

So the issue of spring practice, which on the surface is a deft trick question, probably says more than we intend it to.

More to the point, though, Barnes has what most sensible people would suggest is the best team of the Four, especially now that the other three one-seeds, three of the four two-seeds and two of the four three-seeds are gone.

Thus, he has the burden of being expected to be best while having never been to a Final Four before, without the minimal psychic benefits of being the cute underdog (see Crean), or having the touching Can-This-Finally-Be-His-Turn story line (see Boeheim and especially Williams).

He is admired for his work without having created the kind of easy-to-digest imagery maybe coaches do. Some of that imagery is created by the coach himself; some on their behalf by helpful members of the broadecasting/typing/peeking-through-keyholes industries.

Rick Barnes, though, is sort of that just-a-guy type of coach, the best equivalent being perhaps Mike Montgomery at Stanford. They both take their teams routinely to the NCAA Tournament (11 times to Barnes' 10), but needed a few false starts before going very deep (Barnes' first trip out of the first round was in his fifth attempt, in 1997, the same year Montgomery managed it).

But Montgomery's only Final Four to date came not with Stanford as a putative favorite but as a three-seed that beat the 14, the 11, the two, and then the eight-seed. Texas did it when everyone knew it was coming, and did so by winning three of its four games by double digits.

In short, Rick Barnes is trying to do something truly difficult -- to have the best team in the event he is trying to win while knowing that he won't be the best team on his own campus, no matter how hard he tries.

But if he does so, maybe he can work on that easy-to-categorize image-making we so crave. Maybe he can win the national title while forgetting to wear his pants, or while playing the bassoon, or while whittling a set of golf clubs. We will, after all, take anything we can get.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com