The standard Bill Self has set during his time as head coach at Kansas is such that even the least successful teams of his tenure have a shot, albeit in some cases a rather distant one, to contend for the national title.
This year’s team is still the same set of Jayhawks that earned a preseason No. 1 ranking, that beat a couple of nationally prominent teams in November, that revitalized its season on a pair of occasions after low points in conference play. At the same time, this KU team has looked as vulnerable to shocking losses as any Self has fielded. The combination of calamitous collapses against Houston and Baylor and underwhelming (to put it lightly) showings on the road at places like Kansas State, Utah and BYU got the Jayhawks to their uncharacteristically low seed line entering the tournament.
Here’s a more robust set of reasons why KU could or could not go all the way this year.
Why it could win
– Relatively healthy: Reserve big man Zach Clemence seems poised for a medical redshirt as he has not played since Dec. 14, and guard Shakeel Moore, once the key to the Jayhawks’ January surge, has not played since Feb. 18 after reinjuring his broken foot from the offseason, though KU could still get him back. In general, though, the Jayhawks enter the postseason in a vastly better position than they did last season, when Kevin McCullar Jr. was dealing with a knee bruise (and got shut down altogether) and Hunter Dickinson returned off a dislocated shoulder.
– Extremely experienced: The Jayhawks’ eight-man rotation consists of a sixth-year senior (Harris), a fifth-year senior (Hunter Dickinson), three true seniors (KJ Adams, David Coit and Zeke Mayo), two juniors (Rylan Griffen and AJ Storr) and a lone freshman (Flory Bidunga), a level of veteran wisdom that compares favorably to many of the teams that qualified for this year’s tournament. It’s not just that they’ve been around a long time, either — Harris and Adams won a title at KU three years ago, Dickinson went to two tournaments at Michigan (including on a No. 1 seed as a freshman), Mayo helped South Dakota State to two of its seven all-time tournament appearances, Griffen made the 2024 Final Four and so on.
– Not yet at its ceiling: This is a difficult comparison to make for a player of his caliber, but Storr still could accomplish plenty more for the Jayhawks than he has so far, much like Nick Timberlake last season. Timberlake, who at one point during the 2023-24 campaign went scoreless in four out of five games while shooting 2-for-13 from the field, ended up posting a season-high 19 to help KU escape Samford in the first round last year. Storr scored in double digits just once between Jan. 5 and the end of the regular season and is shooting the worst percentages of his career after averaging 16.8 points per game and earning second-team All-Big Ten honors as a sophomore. The incremental improvement of freshman center Flory Bidunga also provides a potential means for the Jayhawks to become better than they were at any point during the regular season.
– Plays up to good competition: At times this year it has been difficult to reconcile the fact that KU once beat Duke with some of the losses it suffered in conference play, like at home to West Virginia or by 34 points to BYU. But these Jayhawks do get up for big games. They took down Michigan State in Atlanta and the Blue Devils in Las Vegas and trounced then-top 10 Iowa State in Lawrence; they outplayed Big 12 champion Houston at Allen Fieldhouse much of the night, too, before a catastrophic finish, and kept it close with the Cougars a second time on the road.
Why it could not
– Key players are worse away from home: With the caveat that KU has been demonstrably worse on the road throughout the last two seasons, some of the splits this year are rather jarring. Mayo, a Lawrence native, is the most prominent example. By the end of the regular season he was shooting 47.4% overall and 45.5% from deep in home games compared to 38.6% and 30.0% in neutral or road games. He also got to the line about a third as often. That amounted to a dropoff of more than eight points per game. His backcourt mate Harris, meanwhile, scored about the same but shoots 37.7% and 23.8% compared to 50.4% and 39.4% in Allen Fieldhouse.
– Not a streaky team: Winning the NCAA Tournament requires a team to bring everything together for a magical six-game run. The Jayhawks haven’t had a stretch where they looked consistently good for that long since they were playing mid-majors in November. In fact, they strictly alternated wins and losses for a stretch of four weeks from January into February before the rock-bottom Utah road trip and then the “new season” late-February uptick.
– Inexplicably unable to get to the free-throw line: As much as KU’s three-point shooting has been a frequent topic of conversation, the Jayhawks have shown they can score in bunches from beyond the arc when at least two of Coit, Griffen and Mayo have their A-game. The real concern for them is another avenue of scoring that seems to have been closed off to the Jayhawks altogether: free-throw shooting. For much of 2025 KU has ranked in the mid-300s – out of 355 teams – in free-throw attempts per game. Dickinson has actually gotten to the line more frequently than he did in his first year in Lawrence, albeit still less than he did at Michigan, but no KU guard has consistently been able to draw fouls driving into the paint. That doesn’t just limit scoring but also reduces opportunities to put opposing big men in foul trouble.
– Plays down to poor competition: A frequent topic of discussion in midweek and postgame press conferences this season has been KU’s lack of consistent energy, particularly early in games. That was on full display when the Jayhawks fell behind in the opening minutes at Utah, which has since fired its coach, and didn’t lead for even a second on the way to a disastrous 74-67 loss to the Utes. KU has also lost at home to West Virginia when the Mountaineers were missing two key players, blown a school-record 21-point lead to the worst and most depleted Baylor team in years and gotten in a dogfight at home with UCF that came down to the final minute. In short, it hasn’t taken care of lesser opponents in the way Self’s teams usually have, and that could be a concern in the early rounds of the tournament.
2025 NCAA Tournament Preview
A closer look at No. 10 Arkansas, KU’s first-round opponent
Two nearby teams in West Regional already boast wins over KU
KU making rare East Coast trip as unusually low seed
Reasons why KU could or could not win it all
‘We want Flory!’: What will KU get out of its intriguing freshman in the tournament
KU continuing checkered history as preseason No. 1 team
A look back on forgotten moments from the regular season
Injury-marred, transitional season concludes for KU women without postseason play
