By Aidan Joly
On Tuesday night, Dajuan Harris played his 166th collegiate game. Hunter Dickinson played his 155th. Shakeel Moore played his 141st. KJ Adams played his 131st. Zeke Mayo played his 126th.
In that game, Kansas went to Provo and lost to BYU 91-57, the Jayhawks’ worst loss of the season as it fell to 8-7 in Big 12 play and 17-9 overall.
Usually, this would be a team that we are praising for having a pretty good season. However, not this team.
The Jayhawks started the 2024-25 season as the No. 1 team in the country. Now, it is set to fall out of the rankings for the first time this season after the loss to BYU. It plays Oklahoma State on Saturday before the next version of the rankings come out on Monday, but a win there likely won’t be enough to keep them in the rankings.
Kansas’ issues this season have been pronounced and there seems to be several of them.
The first one I have already eluded to is the real lack of leadership on this team, and it is a strange as to why the team has this issue. Eight of its nine rotational players have played 84 or more collegiate games, and five of them have played 100 or more, while a sixth in Rylan Griffen has played in 99 games.
Somebody on this team should be stepping up, and it is simply not happening. It’s happened in several games this season that somebody should have taken charge when things were beginning to unravel, and nobody really did. This seems to be even more of an issue in road games. The Jayhawks are 3-7 this year in true road games – those three wins coming against TCU, Cincinnati and UCF – and is 208th in the country in BartTorvik offensive efficiency when it comes to road games. It is 16th in home games.
Which brings to the next point, is there perhaps an issue with the way the roster is constructed?
Coach Bill Self kept around a core of wings in Adams, Dickinson and Harris, and added a group of key transfers in Mayo, Griffen and AJ Storr.
Mayo has been as advertised, but Griffen and Storr have both seen significant decreases in production that have made them liabilities on the court at times. It’s even more pronounced with Storr, who averaged 16.1 points per game at Wisconsin last season and shot 43.2% from the field. This season, he has seen those numbers drop to 6.2 points per game on 38.2% from the field. These issues have forced Kansas to play down a productive guard and has thrust Harris into the spotlight, one that he should really just be a sixth man role player type. Storr has seen his minutes dwindle and has played seven or less minutes in four of Kansas’ last eight games.
Even Dickinson has seen a drop in productivity. His PPG has only dropped from 17.9 PPG last year to 16.3 this year, but his overall shooting numbers have dropped from 54.8% last year to 52.1% this year, and his three-point numbers have dropped by 12 percentage points, from 35.4% to 23.1%.
Self is 62 years old and has been the Kansas coach for more than two decades. Is he starting to lose a step? That’s really only for him to decide. However, it is a fact that Kansas’ worst two seasons since he has been there have been this season and last season. Last season, Kansas went 10-8 in the league and lost in the round of 32. This season, and get this stat, there is a very real chance that the Jayhawks will be outside of the 1-4 line in NCAA tournament seeding for the first time since 2000. Sure, he won a national championship three years ago, but it hasn’t been super great since then. That national title in 2022 is the most recent time Kansas has been in the second weekend of the tournament. He has even seemed more and more defeated in press conferences last year and this year.
So, what is there to do for the Jayhawks here? Unsure. It does have the aforementioned Oklahoma State game on Saturday followed by going to 1-14 Colorado on Monday, so those games are opportunities to get right. It doesn’t get easier after that though, with a home game against Texas Tech on March 1, at Houston on March 3 and wrapping up the regular season at home against Arizona on March 8.
We will see how Kansas fares there and in the Big 12 tournament. If things go well, maybe they get some faith back. If not, the odds may be stacked against them in the NCAA tournament.
AJ Hoops 