Fresh off upset loss, here’s how Kansas Jayhawks are preparing for Tuesday’s BYU game
Kansas basketball players didn’t board a late-night flight to return home after Saturday’s 74-67 loss to Utah at Huntsman Center in Salt Lake City.
The Jayhawks instead headed to their team hotel headquarters ready to begin preparations for the second part of a two-game, five-day road trip to the Beehive State for Big 12 battles against the Utah Utes (Saturday) and BYU Cougars (Tuesday).
Tipoff between teams with identical (17-8, 8-6) records is 8 p.m. Central at Marriott Center in Provo, Utah, with a live telecast on ESPN.
“Go right back home? Geez, I don’t know. I am not a fortune teller. I don’t know what’s best,” Bill Self, Kansas’ 22nd-year coach, said late Saturday night when asked by a reporter if he’d rather have the team head back to Lawrence after such a disappointing defeat.
“I think financially it’s far better to stay out here than charter another plane back and another plane here. It’s the smart thing to do. If we are playing on (Saturday)-Tuesday again out here I guarantee we’ll do the same thing,” Self added.
A return trip to Lawrence would have meant an early-morning arrival at the Topeka airport just ahead of sunrise Sunday followed by a Monday afternoon return flight to Provo for arrival the night before the BYU contest.
“It’s great,” Self said of Salt Lake City, where the Jayhawks would stay Sunday and part of Monday, then head to Provo Monday afternoon. “I haven’t been here enough. The three times I’ve been here we actually haven’t performed well in Salt Lake one time, counting the last two (NCAA) tournaments.”
KU, which practiced Sunday at the Utah Jazz practice facility in Salt Lake, beat Samford and lost to Gonzaga in the 2024 NCAA Tournament at Salt Lake City’s Delta Center, home of the Jazz. In 2019, KU beat Northeastern, then fell to Auburn on opening week of the NCAAs.
Former KU player Svi Mykhailiuk of the Jazz, out of town on All-Star break, would not be available to visit with the Jayhawks on Sunday.
“Certainly the city and the views and everything, I would think it makes for a good away trip,” Self said. “But you’ve got to play better than what we did tonight in order to enjoy it.”
The Jayhawks on paper face a tougher task Tuesday than they did on Saturday in Game No. 2 in Utah.
BYU, which is coming off Saturday’s 80-65 victory over Kansas State and has won two in a row, can pass the Jayhawks in the Big 12 standings with a victory. The Jayhawks on Sunday were tied with BYU and Baylor for fifth in the league at 8-6. Houston is 13-1, followed by Texas Tech and Arizona (11-3) and Iowa State (10-4).
KU, 3-4 in its last seven games, still has games remaining against Houston, Arizona and Tech.
TCU and Kansas State are 7-7, followed by Utah and West Virginia at 6-8. Cincinnati is 5-9 while UCF and Oklahoma State are 4-10, Arizona State 3-11 and Colorado 1-13.
“Well, you’ve got to understand that it is actually a grind and it totally wears you down if you allow it to wear you down,” Self said, asked by a Utah-based reporter for the recipe for success in the 20-game slate of Big 12 play.
“We’ve had some success (winning 17 league crowns his first 21 seasons at KU, including a stretch of 15 in a row), not as much of late, but the thing I’ve always thought, you win the games you’re supposed to win, you defend your home turf, and then you have to play a way that makes other people play poorly.
“Obviously Utah did that (Saturday), but I think that’s a big key. Just to run guys out there and say we’re going to outscore this team or this or that, that’s not going to work in this league. You’ve got to understand how to grind and how to win the most important possessions and things like that in order to have sustained success in this league.”
BYU has won six of eight games. The Cougars, led by first-year coach Kevin Young, defeated Kansas State on Saturday after a 73-69 win on Feb. 11 at West Virginia.
Junior guard Richie Saunders had 17 points and 14 rebounds, junior guard Dallin Hall 16 points, senior wing Fousseyni Traore 11 points, junior center Keba Keita nine points and 11 rebounds and freshman guard Egor Demin eight assists and five points in the win over KSU.
The Cougars hit only 6 of 23 3s but outrebounded K-State 41-31. For the year, Saunders averages a team-leading 15.0 points per game. He’s 53-of-125 from 3 for 42.4%. Demin averages 11.0 points per game and is 28-of-100 from 3 for 28%.
The Jayhawks may be entering Tuesday’s game trending downward, yet on Saturday prior to the Utah game were projected as a 4-seed and the 15th best team overall in the NCAA’s early bracketology.
“Fifteen is obviously very generous. That’s obviously very good,” Self said. “We’re not playing to that right now. We’ve got to do a lot of things better down the stretch. We need to take it one day at a time, try to regroup, have a couple good days of prep before we go to Provo. That’ll be a monster game there I’m sure with a great atmosphere as well. I don’t think we need to worry about the tournament. I think we need to worry about trying to get better and become a good, solid basketball team again.”
KU center Hunter Dickinson, who had 12 points on 4-of-12 shooting while missing several inside shots against Utah, said the Jayhawks “have got to be little bit better regarding offensive rebounding and turnovers.”
KU had 12 turnovers, Utah just seven on Saturday. The Utes had 22 points off turnovers to KU’s seven. Utah had 16 offensive rebounds to KU’s six.
“We had a lot of good looks we just didn’t get down, especially myself. I just missed too many shots,” Dickinson said. “So they kicked our butt on the glass, and then our turnovers led to points for them and that was the biggest difference in the in the outcome, although there’s a lot of other things we didn’t do well. But rebounding and taking care of the ball crushed us.”
