No, we're not talking about the sleight-of-handle dribble that could serve as a smooth hip-hop backbeat to this year's NCAA Tournament. The reference is not to Tinsley's jaw-dropping passes, which would be banned by Knight but light up a playground by day.

No, this is the funk that Tinsley is in. "Mel," his nickname back in his Brooklyn neighborhood, isn't right. The past 2½ weeks have proved that. Aside from a career-high 29-point performance against Nebraska on March 3, Iowa State's point guard has been slumping.

His second-seeded Cyclones went out in the quarterfinals of the Big 12 Tournament on Friday with Tinsley fouling out while shooting 3-for-15 against Baylor. A week earlier against Texas, he made only 6 of 15 shots while fouling out. Iowa State endured its worst loss in two years that night.

Talented point guard Jamaal Tinsley hopes to lead Iowa State out of its recent funk. (AP)

This time of year you want Tinsley playing funky, not in a funk.

"I want it end right for him," Iowa State coach Larry Eustachy said. "With Jamaal, it's making sure he's ready to play. With the other guys it's did they lose confidence? Jamaal will never lose confidence, that's why he's special. I know he was very disappointed. It wasn't Iowa State as much as it was Baylor. They had a real plan and executed it perfectly."

That is, matching up with Iowa State's outside shooters (Tinsley, Kantrail Horton and Jake Sullivan) and collapsing into the lane every time the ball was dumped inside. Against Texas and Baylor, Tinsley was obviously frustrated trying to do too much. Three of his five fouls in each game were offensive.

Back on the playgrounds of Brooklyn, such impatience would be dealt with by calling your own. In the Big 12, a new way to defend the conference's player of the year might have been discovered.

"Basketball players now are very aggressive," Baylor coach Dave Bliss said. "To tell a Jamaal Tinsley to change the way he's going to play would be counterproductive."

The fact that two of those foul-out jobs have come late in the season is as of little concern to Tinsley as it is Eustachy. Sometimes it looks like Tinsley needs to be motivated by a strong opponent to play at the top of his game.

"My energy level is up, it's just that we came out playing sluggish from the get-go," Tinsley said on Friday. "It's a team thing, we all have to do it together."

And believe it, Eustachy is not concerned. In fact, after Friday's depressing 62-49 loss to Baylor, the word was out that the hard-charging Eustachy was going to punish the Cyclones with a tough practice back in Ames.

"The rumor was we practiced at 12:01 that night," Eustachy said, "that Larry was real mad, da-da-da."

Eustachy actually called his team in the next day for a 3 p.m. practice. Just when the Cyclones were ready for a three-hour boot camp, the team trooped upstairs from the practice floor and was greeted with a spread of ribs, barbeque, chicken and pizza.

"It was the neatest thing I've been in as a coach," Eustachy said. "We told stories for a good 1½-2 hours."

The Cyclones (25-5) need Tinsley more than ever heading into a first-round game against No. 15 Hampton, which is making its first NCAA appearance. Last year, Tinsley was able to team up with All-American Marcus Fizer in leading Iowa State to the Midwest Region final against Michigan State. The collaboration was brilliant, but the focus was on Fizer.

This year, Tinsley took the mantle of being the man in transition. He improved his game from complementary scorer (11.0 points in 1999-2000) to leading scorer (14.5 points). His assists became fewer (down from 6.6 to 6.0) while his shooting became better (from 37.8 percent to 40.1 percent).

"It's just a strange way to get where he's gotten," Hampton coach Steve Merfeld said. "When I found out he never played high school basketball, shoot, go find me one of those kids. How do you find somebody like that, that's my first question to Larry when I see him."

Tinsley's circuitous journey to Ames has been well-chronicled. The brilliant playground star barely attended high school and didn't play high school basketball. He headed west to California to pursue his high school equivalency degree and junior-college degree at Mount San Jacinto Junior College.

During a recruiting visit to Iowa State, he saw the Cyclones lose to Missouri because of a weak backcourt. That was all he needed. Iowa State needed guards, and Tinsley was a good one. Since he arrived two years ago, Iowa State hasn't lost a home game.

Despite his spotty academic background, Tinsley has been able to stay eligible. He was recently taken off the John Wooden Award (national player of the year) list because of what was apparently a sub-2.0 grade-point average.

No one at Iowa State is complaining about the omission, least of all Tinsley, who keeps dealing the funk with his spectacular play.

"That's a credit to them," Merfeld said of Iowa State. "If you can challenge the system, why not?"

It's hard to guard Iowa State because of what Tinsley contributes to an unconventional makeup. The big men -- Paul Shirley and Martin Rancik -- aren't exactly intimidators. The three-guard offense is distributed between 'tweener Horton, pure shooter Jake Sullivan and Tinsley, who can do a little bit of it all.

Tinsley never was a great shooter. It was more his overall game that couldn't be reigned in by the average defense. Tinsley produced a weird quadruple-double in the Feb. 17 victory over Kansas -- 11 points, 11 assists, 13 shots (12 misses) and 12 free throws (nine made).

Tinsley had practiced only a handful of times that week because of a trip home to New York to visit his ailing grandmother. Then, despite shooting 1-for-13, Tinsley might have been the best player on the floor.

"We've won games when he's played very poorly, but when you look at the games when we really had to have him, he went to work," Eustachy said. "At Kansas, he went to work late in the game. When we get to playing against Hampton, one of the best 64 teams in the country, you have to have him or it's not going to work out. He can't play poorly and have us win."