For the Kansas Jayhawks, it all seems to come down to matchups

The noise inside this building will be hard to forget. The energy was fun. Strangest thing, too, watching Kansas play in the Sprint Center and it not be a pseudo home game.

This was the dream matchup for Kansas City, especially the business owners across the street who need the receipts from the Big 12’s most passionate basketball fan bases, and the week had enough good games that this will be remembered as one of the better tournaments in the event’s history.

That Iowa State beat Kansas 70-66 in the Big 12 Tournament final on Saturday is a cool story, the Cyclones beating the Jayhawks two of three times this year and the thought of Fred Hoiberg’s program being Bill Self’s most legitimate competition in years is a fun storyline.

But, as long as we’re being realistic here, the relevance of this result has a shelf-life shorter than the carbonation in an opened can of ginger ale.

“Hey,” KU coach Bill Self says, “by 6 o’clock tomorrow nobody’s going to be thinking about this game. And Iowa State won’t be thinking about it, either. It’s the quickest turn on an emotional game that we have all year long.”

Self is referring to Sunday’s NCAA Tournament selection show, of course, when KU will be almost certainly be a No. 2 seed, and almost certainly in Omaha.

The drama will come in the Jayhawks’ matchup, because it’s been apparent for some time now that this particular team is as matchup-dependent as any Self has had in 12 seasons at KU. It’s also worth pointing out that Self says the same thing about wanting to win the conference tournament and then forgetting about the conference tournament when his team wins this event.

None of that is to say that the Jayhawks didn’t present themselves accurately, good and bad, these last three days here.

This is a flawed team, and always has been, even before Cliff Alexander’s eligibility drama and a list of injuries and hurts that have sidelined or slowed Perry Ellis, Landen Lucas and Frank Mason.

Self is confident that his team “will be whole” by the start of the NCAA Tournament — the Omaha games will be Friday and Sunday — but that is not the same thing as saying his team “will be good.”

This is a predictably unpredictable team, that much has been proven over and over, with blown leads or massive comebacks against Utah, Florida, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Iowa State.

Some of that is inherent in any college basketball team, but has shown to be more prevalent in this one, without a true star or consistent energy or particular strength on which to rely.

This group gets along well, and has mostly taken as its identity the vague claim of “knowing how to win.” On defense, they are greater than the sum of their individual parts — the second half against Iowa State notwithstanding — and the closest thing to a basketball identity may be the ability to make the other team play poorly.

This is Self’s favorite trait in a basketball team — it aligns with a worldview centered around toughness — but without the ability to play well yourself it means a lot of games won in the margins.

For the most part, those margins have been good to KU. They’ve played the nation’s toughest schedule, and many of their best wins — Utah, Georgetown, at Baylor, and Oklahoma, for instance — have turned on a few possessions. That absurd comeback against West Virginia ended up being the difference between sharing the conference title and winning it outright.

But the flip side of playing on a razor’s edge is that sometimes you get cut, and KU’s last experience before the part of the season that defines every team is a flesh wound.

KU led by 17 early in the second half, a lead blown by a combination of fatigue, loss of focus, and an inability to defend. As Self put it, KU played one great half and one awful half, the difference coming down to their awful being worse than their great was good.

Over an 18-game season in what is the nation’s deepest — if not best — conference, KU claimed an outright title by being better than the other nine teams at grinding through and winning on the fly. But that can be exposed in smaller samples, which is always the danger in the NCAA Tournament.

This is a bit of a strange place for KU. It is ranked in the nation’s top 10, champions of a tough league, and yet the expectations from fans are as low as they’ve been in some time. That’s a testament to the ridiculous standards Self has set at KU, but also creates a different environment for this team than its predecessors.

A fabulous week of Big 12 basketball included the full 2015 KU experience. They were nondescript in beating a bad team on Thursday, effectively ugly in beating a good team on Friday, and alternatively excellent and horrible against a very good team on Saturday.

What parts of that experience we see in the NCAA Tournament depends more upon matchups than it has for KU in years. We knew that before this week, of course, so seeing it packed into three days was a more reinforcement than revelation.

It also provided the backdrop for a heck of a party, which, when you think about it, is as important as anything else.

This story was originally published March 14, 2015 at 10:23 PM with the headline "For the Kansas Jayhawks, it all seems to come down to matchups."