Kansas coach Bill Self said that the crowd Saturday at Allen Fieldhouse for the game against No. 4 Houston was the best it’s been all season.
“I think our fans were more turned up today,” Self said, “because we were playing a team that we know if we didn’t play well, (the other team) could leave out of here happy.”
He then suggested that KU will find itself on the receiving end of a similar sort of fervor in the very near future.
“I would think that the atmosphere we’ll play in on Monday will be very comparable to the atmosphere Houston played in today,” he said.
There will be no rest for the Jayhawks — whose starters played between 33 and 37 minutes, as Self noted postgame — and now it’s time for the Sunflower Showdown.
KU will face Kansas State for the first time this season Monday at 8 p.m. in Bramlage Coliseum, the site of a memorable overtime battle on Jan. 17, 2023, that the Jayhawks lost on a game-ending lob from Markquis Nowell to Keyontae Johnson.
Both of those players are gone to the pros, as are others from last year’s unheralded Elite Eight team. And the Wildcats are stumbling to an extent they generally did not back in Jerome Tang’s first season at the helm. After dropping a 75-72 decision to struggling Oklahoma State in Stillwater on Saturday, K-State fell to 4-5 in league play and 14-8 overall. It has lost four straight conference games in a turbulent stretch on and off the court.
The Wildcats have been led by the trio of returnee Cam Carter and transfers Arthur Kaluma (Creighton) and Tylor Perry (North Texas), who all average between 14 and 16 points per game. They are joined in the starting lineup by wing David N’Guessan and forward Will McNair.
K-State has lived life on the edge at times this year and throughout Tang’s tenure; at one point in nonconference play the Wildcats went to overtime four times in six games. But Tang remains 10-0 in the extra period as their coach, including that win over KU in Manhattan last year.
KSU will be hoping for a result more like that one and less like anything it has done recently, or even the 90-78 loss it took in Lawrence two weeks after last season’s victory.
One encouraging sign for the Jayhawks, who haven’t always defended the arc well, is that the Wildcats shoot just 31% from deep, the worst mark in the Big 12 as of Saturday night. They also commit 15 turnovers per game. As well as KU defended Houston Saturday, it turned the Cougars over just thrice in 40 minutes.
But coaches would tell you that’s the sort of harkening back to previous games that no team can do.
“We’ve got nine more games,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said Saturday. “That’s what I’m focused on. In this business, especially in this league, you’d better have a short memory. Got to forget this one, got to move on. I’m sure Bill will say the same thing.”
Indeed, Self concurred: “The biggest thing is, how do you not let one become two, or how do you extend momentum when you’re playing well and how do you shrink it when you’re not? So yeah, we’ve all got to move on.”
