How Kansas went from preseason No. 1 to college basketball’s biggest disappointment

Kansas basketball is learning experience and money can’t overcome a bad roster construction.

Bill Self’s stranglehold on Big 12 men’s basketball has been just about the most consistent thing in all of sports. Self’s Kansas Jayhawks won at least a share of the Big 12 regular season championship 14 straight years from 2002-2018, breaking a record previously held by John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins. Even after the streak broke, Kansas bounced back with one of Self’s greatest teams ever in 2020 before the pandemic canceled in the NCAA tournament. Two years later, he found redemption by leading the Jayhawks to the 2022 national championship on a team featuring Christian Braun and Ochai Agbaji.

This was supposed to be the year Self’s Jayhawks bounced back after an uncharacteristic down season a year ago, when the team finished just 10-8 in conference got knocked out blown out by Gonzaga in the round of 32. Kansas returned three key starters in center Hunter Dickinson, forward KJ Adams, and point guard Dajuan Harris. It landed a five-star recruit in bouncy big man Flory Bidunga. Then Self went into the transfer portal with one of the biggest bags of NIL money in the country, and essentially had his pick of players to augment his core.

Kansas brought in talented wing scorer AJ Storr from Wisconsin. It signed Lawrence-native Zeke Mayo after a prolific three-year career at South Dakota State. It snagged a big wing in Rylan Griffin from Alabama, and filled out the bench with a star from Northern Illinois (David Coit) and a role player from Mississippi State (Shakeel Moore).

When the preseason polls were released, Kansas sat at a familiar position of being No. 1. These Jayhawks were supposed to be a premium example of how to construct a roster in the NIL era: they retained their foundational pieces, augmented them with some of the most coveted transfers in the country, and had one of the oldest and most experienced rosters in the country during the final season of the bonus Covid year.

What Self has learned this year is talent on paper doesn’t matter when the pieces don’t fit. Experience can only take you so far when the roster feels like it’s built to succeed in 2010, not 2025.

BYU blasted Kansas, 91-57, on Tuesday night. The loss will drop the preseason No. 1 right out of the polls next week, and suddenly pushes them to just 8-7 in Big 12 play. The Jayhawks’ NCAA tournament bid may not be in jeopardy yet — our bracketologist Chris Dobbertean had KU as a No. 4 seed before the BYU loss — but it’s becoming clear that this is a lost season that will force Self to reevaluate everything when it’s over.

The 34-point loss ties the biggest margin of defeat in the Self era. It’s not like BYU is a great team this year. We had the Cougars as one of the last four teams into the field before facing Kansas. This is the type of opponent the Jayhawks should run out of the gym even on the road, but not anymore. In many ways, this game was a microcosm of Kansas’ season: they were bricking threes all night, couldn’t get to the free throw line, and had no way of coming back once BYU’s onslaught started.

Once Kansas gets down, it feels like they’re incapable of coming back. This team was obviously going to have shooting and spacing concerns coming into the season by playing a traditional big in Dickinson alongside a non-shooting four in Adams and a non-shooting point guard in Harris. During a time when teams at every level of the game are trying to engineer five-out spacing, Self thought he could win with one or two shooters on the floor at a time.

The results have been disastrous: only 34.1 percent of Kansas’ field goal attempts come from three-point range this year, which ranks outside of the top-300 in DI, per KenPom. They only make 33.9 percent of those shots, which ranks No. 167 in the country. Right off the bat, the Jayhawks are losing the math game every night.

The lack of shooting doesn’t just hurt at the three-point line. Kansas’ perimeter players have no room to drive to the basket on such a crowded floor, and it shows up in their abysmal free throw rate. Only six teams in DI get to the free throw line less often than Kansas on a per possession basis — Marist, Drexel, Colgate, Florida Gulf Coast, Canisius, and Holy Cross. That is not the type of company Kansas — Kansas! — should be keeping. The Jayhawks also get basically nothing back on the offensive glass, with an offensive rebound rate that ranks No. 193 in America.

With an inability to access the most efficient parts of the floor — threes, rim shots, and the free throw line — the Jayhawks are doomed to the areas the opposing defenses are willing to concede. Dickinson’s post-ups have become less and less effective over time as he struggles with his touch even when he can establish inside position. Harris has always had turnover problems as teams have packed the paint and dared him to shoot from the outside, and those remain an issue. Storr was brought in to bring offensive punch off the bounce, but he’s been one of the most disappointing transfers in America with a one-track mind to shoot that doesn’t fit how Self wants to play. Adams just feels like he’s clogging the floor on offense, unable to leverage his lob catching and rim finishing prowess because he doesn’t have any space.

Perhaps most damning of all, Self said after the BYU loss that his team just needs to get away from each other:

Self is one of the few holdovers among elite coaches from the pre-NIL era. Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Jay Wright, and Tony Bennett all hung it up in the last few years as the rules changed the money could start being exchanged above the table. There were always allegations that Self did his best work under the table in the pre-NIL days, even if Kansas somehow barrel-rolled out of the FBI investigation with just slap on the wrist. These days, the prestige of Kansas’ brand can be matched or surpassed by deep bags of money at NIL schools.

Are Kansas’ advantages gone? Not quite. Self still pulled in coveted transfers at top dollar, with Storr reportedly getting $750K and others surely cashing in. Next season, Self has top recruit Darryn Peterson coming in. Peterson is an absolute superstar who we have the projected No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. He could go down as the best player Self ever coached.

Will Self actually keep coaching, though? At 62 years old, he’s looking at a totally different college basketball landscape. NIL has completely altered the sport, the conference expansion means he now has to fly to Utah and Houston and Arizona for league games. Given how many legendary coaches have called it quits recently, would it shock you if Self suddenly retired after this year?

This is just no way for Self to go out. The opportunity to coach Peterson — potentially an all-time great scoring guard prospect (yes, I realize the weight of those words) — is too tempting to pass up. Dickinson will mercifully be out of eligibility, and the team will no longer be catered to him. Kansas will still have tons of money to throw at transfers. If they can convince Bidunga to come back, they have a ready-made pick-and-roll combination and defensive anchor to fall back on.

It just didn’t work this year, which is an odd thing to say for Kansas basketball. Being older isn’t always better when there’s a reason the NBA doesn’t want your players. Self can take plenty of lessons from how the team failed while built around Dickinson, Harris, and Adams. There just aren’t many quick fixes this season.