What the Baylor game will reveal about this year's Jayhawks
Last Saturday, Kentucky trounced Kansas in a way we just haven’t seen at Allen Fieldhouse. It was only Bill Self’s 16th loss at the barn, an incredible fact in itself, but one would be hard-pressed to remember a more evocative one. Kentucky—a team similarly stocked with transfer portal players—was longer, stronger, and shot the ball better. They killed Kansas on the boards. West Virginia transfer Oscar Tshiebwe routinely ripped the ball out of the hands of the Jayhawks, who stood around looking at each other, eyes glazed over.
What happened?
After the game, KU’s defensive efficiency—a crucial part of Bill Self’s basketball calculus—fell to 55th, a low-water-mark for his tenure. (They’re up to 46th after a nice bounce-back win at Hilton Coliseum). The only thing obscuring the crisis slightly is their effectiveness on offense; they’re third in the country in offensive efficiency despite the fact that the offense has stalled out during a few critical stretches this season.
After the UK loss, program beatwriter Jesse Newell wrote a particularly haunting column. A sample:
Oscar Tshiebwe lived up to his national-player-of-the-year hype while going for 17 points and 14 rebounds. Almost as impressively, Georgia transfer Sahvir Wheeler was a calming presence at point, posting seven points and eight assists in 34 minutes, while Davidson transplant Kellan Grady made 4 of 7 threes for 12 points as well.
Those are all first-year players for Kentucky coach John Calipari from the portal. And it had to be the type of impact Self was hoping for when he went the same route to pluck Remy Martin, Joe Yesufu, Jalen Coleman-Lands and Cam Martin in the spring and summer.
KU’s first run at the transfer portal has been a mixed bag, at best. The offense is undeniably improved, and the rotation deeper, at least on paper. But Self has been unable to find players like Jalen Coleman-Lands and Joseph Yesufu—who have both shown Jayhawk fans that they have something—more minutes. It’s now not clear how healthy Remy Martin has ever been in a Jayhawk uniform, and Self’s tone has been noticeably more forgiving of Martin lately. We absolutely lit a schollie on fire with the Cam Martin thing.
KU is still searching for an identity on offense. Matchup-hunting dribble-handoffs have felt less effective, a casualty of increasingly position-less basketball, and I feel the collective groan every time KU forces a post touch to Dave McCormack, who hasn’t been good enough to justify that kind of focus. Dajuan Harris has regressed.
Here’s the line that really got me though:
The goal then, for Self, is to raise KU’s ceiling. How can the Jayhawks get to a level where they can compete with any of college basketball’s elites?
As NCAA sanctions still loom over the program, KU has not been able to recruit to their standard. Here are our recruiting rankings from the past 5 seasons, according to 247Sports: 11 (2021), 23 (2020), 15 (2019), 5 (2018) and 9 (2017). You’d certainly consider KU one of the top five programs in the country, but that hasn’t been the recruiting narrative. These days, KU is looking up at programs like Florida State, Alabama, etc. That has to change.
Tomorrow’s game against defending national champion Baylor is the best opportunity yet to see who this KU team really is, and if this group can summon the ability to play above their talent level. For years, Scott Drew against Bill Self was a meme. One coach made seemingly every correct decision while the other did the opposite. But things have changed, and Self and Drew have the same amount of national titles. Drew has grown as a coach and found a playing style that unleashes a two-way tornado. Will KU get run off the floor again? Or do plucky, short-staffed wins against teams like Iowa State push Kansas forward on both sides of the ball?
Bill Self is an optimizer. But the question remains—are we getting closer to this team’s ceiling, or further away? We’ll know the answer tomorrow afternoon.