Kansas City, Mo. — Kansas coach Bill Self still has a lot left to learn about his 2025-26 team, but he has a lineup in mind for Friday’s road exhibition game at Louisville.
The Jayhawks’ first five at the KFC Yum! Center — “as of today,” Self said on Wednesday at Big 12 media days at the T-Mobile Center — “even though that could change” — will consist of guards Darryn Peterson and Melvin Council Jr., wing Kohl Rosario and forwards Tre White and Flory Bidunga.
Peterson, the top prospect in the 2025 recruiting class as assessed by multiple recruiting sites and a potential No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, always seemed a shoo-in to start and feature heavily, as was the sophomore center Bidunga, who returned to KU in the offseason with a desire to take on a bigger role.
Council and White arrived as veteran transfers in the offseason, and Self recently said White has “outplayed everybody else” to appear alongside Bidunga in the frontcourt, while Peterson said on “The Sideline with Andy Katz” that he and Council can be “one of the best backcourts in the country this year.” (Council, for his part, said that he considers himself the Robin to Peterson’s Batman.)
The fastest riser of the bunch has been Rosario, a Miami native who was until recently playing in Overtime Elite as part of the 2026 recruiting class. Rosario opted to reclassify — “If you’re the best person in the gym, you got to go to a different gym,” he later said — and picked KU over the summer, dazzling coaches and teammates with his high motor and athletic ability almost as soon as he arrived in Lawrence.
“He’s a Big 12 athlete from a physical standpoint and from a vertical standpoint,” Self said on Wednesday. “What he needs to do to be Big 12-ready is he needs to be there from a scoring standpoint too.”
Self has previously referred to Rosario as a streaky shooter, but one who is continually eager to shoot.
“We need him to score and make shots,” Self added, “because there’s some things that he can do that you can’t coach, but that’s one thing that for us to be good, we got to have somebody that can do that.”
The lineup Self tentatively suggested for Friday at Louisville sets up Elmarko Jackson, a returning redshirt sophomore who is coming off a season-ending torn patellar tendon in the summer of 2024, and Jayden Dawson, a transfer from Loyola-Chicago who was KU’s first offseason acquisition, for key minutes at guard off the bench. Bryson Tiller, Paul Mbiya and Samis Calderon will spell the likes of Bidunga and White in the frontcourt. KU also has freshman Corbin Allen, redshirt sophomore Jamari McDowell and graduate student Nginyu Ngala (from Laurentian University in Canada) in reserve, as well as several walk-ons.
Self said on Wednesday that he and Louisville coach Pat Kelsey hadn’t discussed any potential format changes for Friday’s exhibition. Last year, KU played quarters instead of halves when it took on Arkansas at Bud Walton Arena.
“I think we’re going to play it like a game,” he said.
He also said that he expects everyone on the roster to be healthy. That’s a good sign for Dawson, who had been dealing with a sore knee and who sat out the scrimmage portion of Late Night in the Phog last Friday.
Notes on Louisville
Kelsey has turned around the Cardinals’ program in a hurry since arriving from the College of Charleston, as Louisville improved from 8-24 under Kenny Payne in 2023-24 to 27-8 last year, although it did fall in the first round of the tournament to Creighton.
Louisville lost many of its top scorers to the professional ranks after the season, but has loaded up for another run through the ACC with the addition of top-10 freshman Mikel Brown Jr. and a trio of double-digit scorers from the transfer portal: Ryan Conwell (16.5 points per game at Xavier), Isaac McKneely (14.4 at Virginia) and Adrian Wooley (18.8 at Kennesaw State).
That trio joins another veteran guard in J’Vonne Hadley, a sixth-year senior at his fourth school, as well as a frontcourt that includes two previously injured big men in Aly Khalifa (a familiar face from his BYU tenure) and Kasean Pryor, as well as some international additions. It all amounts to a No. 11 ranking in the preseason for the Cardinals, while KU starts out the year at No. 19.
KU will get the chance to try out its new-look roster for the first time in a hostile environment — one where the results don’t count — much as it did at Illinois in 2023 and at Arkansas in 2024.
“I think it’s a good experience to know what’s your weakness and what you need to work on, so I think this exhibition game will help us with what to do,” Bidunga said.
Tipoff is set for 6:30 p.m. Central time on Friday, and the game will be televised on the ACC Network.
