Bill Self's greatest punchline
Bill Self has run the play since the very beginning. If you’ve been chatting with us during games, you know we love to riff and goof—last night featured comparisons of Self to Tom Petty, Nirvana, Prince, Dr. Dre and David Bowie, and all of that felt accurate, good, right. The crux of the concept is that no matter how much all of these artists (including Self, yes, doing it) evolve over decades, they still can reach into the past and salvage ideas and tensions that made fans fall in love in the first place.
Enter: Self’s inbounds oop play (15:58 in the video, if my auto-play sync didn’t work), at a critical moment of a road game in Lubbock that had began to feel very sketchy—TTU got whistled for six fouls… in the entire game. While Texas Tech had not been known as a team that wanted to shoot the ball, instead favoring those close-to-the-rim shots Self has made a career out of taking away, TTU coach Mark Adams knew he had to reverse the dynamic, and Texas Tech chucked it. Adams is a good foil for Self, a coach who has shown feel and made adjustments in games against Kansas. He knows Self’s style as well as anyone, and knows he’s gotta have multiple counters each game.
But, once again, Self had the last laugh. He reversed the reverse. This is where Self’s strategy verges into the comic.
For all of the intricate tweaks Self makes—The Athletic reporter CJ Moore has done an excellent job highlighting and analyzing these micro-movements, for those who want to see things more granularly—he’s still a master of the set-up and the punchline. Outside of the dribble handoff, Self’s most famous play at KU has been the in-bounds oop under the basket. The setup is so obvious that Fran Fraschilla1 had to literally restrain himself from calling it out on the broadcast, which feels like absolutely part of the bit. You can study all the modern Self stuff you want to, but he can still whip out the oldest trick in the book and catch you flat-footed. It is as glorious as it is hilarious.
Don’t get Self riled up. He is Baba Yaga, which is not exactly the Boogeyman. That is all. This team is good.
I have a pet theory about Fraschilla, who KU fans have really seemed to turn on recently. Here it is—he was such a KU homer for decades that he tried to balance things out with critiques in recent years, all of which seem sort of blurted out, forced, maybe even a little unfair. The officiating sucks in college basketball. Fran ain’t as good as he once was, but idk, it’s a Wednesday night broadcast on a channel that the World Wide Leader seems hellbent against modernizing. I’m not gonna waste any energy getting too upset over it!