I’m starting this post Wednesday as I sit in the waiting room while L gets her foot operated on. I thought about just skipping this topic, but since I have time to kill, I might as well share a some thoughts about the Jayhawks.
I don’t know of any way to label the last few weeks as anything other than the biggest on-court disaster this program has faced in over 40 years. It seems like the team lost whatever heart they had on those back-to-back Saturdays when they first blew the lead late against Houston – twice – and then coughed up a 21-point lead against Baylor. I’m not sure how much heart this team had to begin with, but whatever it did possess was crushed into meaningless dust after those two losses.
Last Saturday’s game against Utah was a perfect example. Utah is not a good team and has one good player. The Jayhawks let that one guy get open continually and drain 3’s so the Utes built up an immediate big lead. KU showed almost no effort on either end of the court, were routinely late with switches on defense (if they switched at all) and when they were aggressive on offense, it was reckless, not calculated and controlled.
They made a run just before halftime, let the Utes stretch it out again, came all the way back one more time, then absolutely fell on their faces in the closing minutes. They somehow kept Utah from scoring for nearly seven minutes and still trailed when they finally made a shot.
Rumor has it there was an intense “conversation” in the locker room after the game.
A lot of good that did.
As bad as Saturday was, Tuesday night against BYU was so much worse. Thank goodness I used needing to get up early to bring L to the hospital as an excuse to not watch the game. I expected bad news Wednesday morning but was utterly shocked when I saw KU lost by 34 points. Thirty four.
Yep, this team is toast. Even if the roster was ravaged by the combination of flu, Covid, and norovirus that seems to be waylaying most of the country, that would not be an excuse for how they have completely fallen apart. They just don’t play hard enough, or ever have five guys on the court who seem pissed off enough about the way things are going to change the team’s path.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and I’ve addressed some of those targets in previous posts.
It has reached the point, though, where everything lands on Bill Self and his coaching staff. They recruited the wrong players, or at least the wrong combination of players. They haven’t found a way to get the kids they have to work together. There are apparently accountability issues. Schisms because of how different players are treated differently. And so on. We’ve reached the point where there are 1000 rumors about what is wrong, so it’s hard to know which are accurate and which are just speculation by frustrated fans.
All that is 100% on the coaches.
I think they looked too much at the resumes of transfers and not enough at how those players would fit together, or into Self’s system. Worse, he has seemed at a loss at how to make adjustments to style of play and/or how he manages minutes/personalities to find a way to get these mis-matched pieces to work together.
Every Big 10 fan I talked to said AJ Storr would not be able to guard and would drive Self crazy. That’s been the case since before the first game.
Rylan Griffen was a solid defensive player at Alabama. But Nate Oates plays a completely different style of defense from Self. I’m not sure if Self should have been able to see that Griffen’s skill set did not fit his switch-heavy preference. I do think he saw a terrific shooter and figured the rest of it would work out. The problem being Griffen might be the worst defender of the Self era – he literally falls down for no reason multiple times each game – thus can’t stay on the court, thus can’t get in a shooting rhythm, and has become a wasted scholarship.
Zeke Mayo has done exactly what he was asked to do, come in and be a scoring guard. But because of Storr and Griffen’s failures and DaJuan Harris’ limitations, way more has been asked of Mayo than expected. When he’s good, he’s been very good, and arguably KU’s most consistent player. But too often he’s forced to handle the ball against pressure and commits terrible turnovers, or forces shots because no one else on his team can hit one.
Nick Timberlake was a disaster last year.
Bill Self struggled so much connecting with Remy Martin that it nearly ruined the 2022 National Championship team.
Joe Yesufu never found his role.
Cam Martin was a bizarre first signing of the portal era and a waste of a scholarship.
Kevin McCullar was great, until he got injured and disappeared last year.
Hunter Dickinson was also great last year, also until he got injured. While he’s had some good games this year, he’s been far less consistent and missed way too many close shots for a guy who is 7’2”. He wrecks KU’s defense, which a lot of anonymous coaches suggested would be the case before he arrived in Lawrence. And while we don’t know for sure if he has been a problem in the locker room, there is plenty of smoke to suggest that his personality and effort is part of the problem. He also seems to have lost that edge he used played with.
Then there’s the whole long list of high school recruits that have either not shown up in Lawrence, have gotten hurt, who have transferred away after one year, or just have been duds.
Seriously, over the past four high school recruiting classes, only Gradey Dick and Flory Bidunga have come close to reaching their potential. To be fair, KJ Adams over-achieved, but he was seen as a career role player. The fact he’s a three-year starter shows another issue with KU’s recruiting. Someone, Ernest Udeh and/or Zuby Ejiofor most notably who both fled when Dickinson signed, should have taken KJ’s minutes three years ago. That never happened.
The staff gets bonus points for grabbing Johnny Furphy at the last minute in the summer of 2023, but he developed so much faster than expected that he only lasted a year on campus. Perhaps if he had stayed he would have fixed some of this year’s issues, and kept one of this year’s transfer disasters from getting his scholarship.
Beyond that group, the high school recruits are a bunch of guys who washed out at KU, and often at their second and third schools as well. Now a couple of these classes were put together under the cloud of the NCAA investigation. Still, the lack of success over four classes doesn’t bode well for identifying players and developing them the way the staff used to.
Add a bunch of transfers on top of those failures, and you have an old roster that didn’t come of age at KU. They didn’t pick up the cultural DNA from the guys in front of them. They didn’t go to Ames and Waco and Morgantown and Manhattan and steal games that seemed lost with 2:00 left because some guy who had been on the roster for four years made a couple of big plays late.
That’s a recipe for disaster in modern basketball.
There is zero hope for this year’s team. This was supposed to be the easiest six game stretch of the season, and they are 1–3 so far, with the one win coming against a then winless in the Big 12 Colorado team that we had to sweat out until the final minutes. Dickinson isn’t going to suddenly start shooting 70% from the field and moving quickly on defense. Harris isn’t going to suddenly stop taking terrible shots and start guarding the way he used to. Griffen and Storr aren’t suddenly going to start playing at the level they did a year ago at their previous schools. Mayo won’t suddenly stop turning the ball over and start scoring 30 points a night to carry the team. And so on.
We Jayhawks fans have always had the hope of next year when we lost to some stupid team in March. There were always new, highly ranked recruits coming in to join with young guys on the roster who would improve. There was always the certainty that Bill Self would find a way to mold a team that was greater than the sum of its individual parts.
For the first time in the Self era, I’m worried about what’s ahead. Even if Bidunga returns (Please, Lord, let Flory stay!) and Darryn Peterson and Bryson Tiller are as good as advertised. Because I’m not sure I trust Self to pick the right transfers to slot in with that group. And there won’t be those old heads on the roster to guide these young bucks. And I’m worried that between going all-in with transfers to chase a third title, his health scare, and the utter depression of back-to-back preseason number one teams falling apart, Self might have lost his mojo.
I hate to be defeatist, but I guess I should appreciate that we had a pretty good 40 year run and hope that this era of relative shittiness will pass quickly.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my YouTube feed suddenly got flooded with highlights from classic KU games over the past week. I mean, once you watch one you’re going to get more, right? But there were several from the tournament runs in ’22, ’18, and ’12 that popped up before I watched any of them. Algorithm always knows.