Much of the discussion surrounding the late-stage returns of Kansas veterans Tre White and Melvin Council Jr. has centered on how they may shake up the Jayhawks’ rotation, but what of their jersey numbers?
Given that the Kansas men’s basketball team spent the vast majority of its offseason thinking that it had left White and Council behind in the spring of 2026, there was no reason for the Jayhawks to hold off on assigning jersey Nos. 3 and 14.
A dozen players wore No. 3 for KU and a dozen more had worn No. 14 before White and Council did so, and there was no reason to think there would be any issue with assigning those numbers to freshmen Atticus Richmond and Luke Barnett, respectively.
They had each sported those particular digits before, Richmond at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in his hometown of Lincolnshire, Illinois, before he did a postgraduate year at The Newman School in Boston in No. 5, and Barnett at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California.
But based on the rulings of judges in various Monroe Counties across the country — White in Monroe County, Indiana, and Council in Monroe County, New York — those two recent Jayhawks came back to Lawrence mere weeks before the season, and came calling for their old numbers.
“I obviously wasn’t looking forward to doing that,” Richmond said, “but you got to do what you got to do with a guy like Tre White coming back.”
Richmond is a 6-foot-8 developmental forward whom head coach Bill Self has compared to Mitch Lightfoot. He was originally committed to Columbia before receiving the opportunity to attend KU, where his brother goes and where numerous other members of his family have previously. (Evidently that did not mean that he possessed much cachet in this situation.)
“Kind of that seniority comes in to where it’s like, ‘OK, I’m a freshman, you got to give it to him, I got to figure it out,'” Richmond said.
He was not especially broken up about losing No. 3: “It didn’t really have as much meaning to me as I’m sure it had to him.” (“Tre” is a nickname, and White also has a dog named 3, although he didn’t wear jersey No. 3 until he arrived at KU last season.) Richmond doubled his original choice and adopted No. 6 instead.
“I like the single-digit numbers,” Richmond said, “so once I couldn’t go three I could either go one, six or nine, and I just felt like six felt right out of those.”
The NCAA only recently added digits from 6 to 9, which require two hands for referees to signal, back to the pool of available jersey numbers, and Rylan Griffen and Samis Calderon have worn No. 6 at KU in the years since; prior to that only Jerry Waugh (1948-51) and LaVannes Squires (1953-54) had done so. No. 9, by the way, has not been worn at KU since Bob Kenney (1950-52).
Council, for his part, got his own injunction to return to school after White, which meant in turn that Barnett had a narrower pool of numbers to pick from: “Because Tre came before Melvin,” Richmond said, “I had a week before Luke to decide, so then that took six off the board for Luke and he just went one.”
Barnett didn’t mind adopting No. 1, which Jayden Dawson wore last year. (Dawson, who is part of the same lawsuit as White, is back at his former school Loyola-Chicago; there is no such numerical privilege for him, though, as he’s currently listed as No. 24 there.) Barnett described it as “a good switch.”
“He wore it last year,” Barnett said. “it’s his number at Kansas, so I just understood that him coming back, that’s the number he’s already played here with, and I mean, I’ve never played here with 14, so I feel like I just understood that it was kind of his number coming back.”
Council, who wore No. 1 at Monroe College and No. 11 at Wagner and St. Bonaventure, sounded at least a little regretful about how things panned out with Barnett.
“Oh, see, I didn’t want to get No. 14 back, because Luke, he’s a great guy,” Council said. “Great guy, and that’s my boy, and I was talking to Coach about it. And me and Luke, we talked about it, but Luke understands, and I’m just thankful that he let me get my number back.”
The single rarest jersey number on this year’s roster is Kohl Rosario’s No. 7. He is just the fourth player to wear it as a Jayhawk.
