“I am a big Bill Self fan and enjoy watching his teams play,” Bradley coach Jim Les said of Kansas University’s third-year coach.

He’ll get the closest look of his life Friday, when Bradley and Self’s Jayhawks meet in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Tipoff is at 8:30 p.m. from the Palace of Auburn Hills, just outside of Detroit. The winner will play the winner of the Pittsburgh-Kent State game on Sunday.

Bradley, a Missouri Valley Conference school located in Peoria, earned an at-large berth as the 13 seed in the Oakland (Calif.) regional. Kansas, winners of the Big 12 Conference tournament, is the four seed.

“I’ve watched them grow up as the year’s gone by,” Les said. “That’s an awfully good basketball team.”

Self, a former coach at Illinois, was equally impressed with Bradley, which finished the regular season with a 20-10 record, as MVC tournament runner-ups and with an RPI in the mid-30s.

“From being at Illinois, I know they love their basketball there,” Self said after hearing of the pairing. “They have a couple of guys the NBA people are high on.”

Among them is Marcellus Sommerville, a 6-foot-7 forward with the ability to score, rebound and shoot from long range. A three-time All-MVC pick, Sommerville averages 15.4 points per game, leading Bradley.

Really, though, the Braves thrive in balanced scoring. Besides Sommerville, Patrick O’Bryant (13.2 ppg), Tony Bennett (11.0) and Lawrence Wright (10.0) all average in double figures.

Regarded all season long as the little league that could, the Missouri Valley ended up taking four teams to the NCAA Tournament, with Bradley seeded the lowest. Seeded 13th, Bradley and Air Force likely snagged the last two at-large invitations. Southern Illinois (11th, Atlanta), Wichita State (7th, Washington) and Northern Iowa (10th, Minneapolis) were the other MVC representatives.

It took a late-season surge for the Braves to be in Auburn Hills today, too – after starting the season 8-6, Bradley won 11 of its last 14 and advanced to the MVC tournament final by beating regular-season league champ Wichita State in the semis.

Southern Illinois beat Bradley, 59-46, in the finals, but by then the Braves’ invitation to the Big Dance already was stamped.

“We’re happy and honored to be in,” Les said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for the level of basketball in this league. We’re continuing to make this upward climb to get national respect.”

Nowhere would the respect cry be heard louder than at the tournament, which has seen teams like Gonzaga and, yeah, Bucknell grab key victories that propelled their programs to higher prestige.

Bradley hasn’t been in the tournament since 1996, hasn’t won a tournament game since 1986 and hasn’t lived true tournament glory since the 1950s, when two Bradley teams – the 1950 and 1954 squads – were national runners-up.

The 1950 Braves, in fact, beat Kansas, 59-57, en route to the championship game. There, Bradley fell to CCNY, 71-68.

Fifty-six years later, Les is trying to build the Bradley program back up, hoping to relate it better with the glory years, the tournament teams and its past marquee players, like Hersey Hawkins.

“It’s great to see Bradley put back on this stage,” Les said. “It’s something that has taken a lot of work, but it was certainly worth every ounce of sweat dropped by a lot of people.”