Why KU, Mizzou basketball still have time to turn it around for March Madness
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- KU and Mizzou have shown higher ceilings than recent play.
- Teams aim to learn from late losses to diagnose issues.
- Teams have limited time to fix issues before the tournament selection.
In its final NCAA Tournament rehearsal — not only its final chance to make an impression on the selection committee, but a final opportunity to shift the momentum of its month — Kansas scored 47 points. Six players combined to miss 17 straight shots.
How’s that for a tune-up?
In the moments after Houston blew out Kansas in Kansas City, I’d asked a couple of players a version of that question. They obliged, but then KU coach Bill Self leaned into the microphone.
“Can I add to that?” he asked.
“If we could have played better ... and been more competitive in the game, does that make us more prepared for next week? I’m not sure it does.”
The optimistic, best-case scenario for Kansas is these last few weeks have provided some lessons — that the recent run of play will “inspire us,” as Self put it.
Is there legitimacy to that? Does that happen this time of year?
Almost every year, actually.
The Kansas and Missouri men’s basketball teams will set out on their respective NCAA Tournament paths Friday night — fourth-seeded KU with a trip to San Diego to meet California Baptist and 10th-seeded Mizzou with a short drive to St. Louis to face Miami.
KU and MU took remarkably different paths to earn a spot in the tournament. But there are two striking similarities now that they’re here:
• They aren’t playing their best basketball in March.
• Their team’s success is far too reliant on the success of a single player.
Those two things are related. It’s been the crux of our recent coverage, same as it should be the crux of their week between games.
With Darryn Peterson, its star freshman, looking as healthy as he has all season, Kansas hasn’t found a rhythm. Instead, it’s almost broken KU’s rhythm. A point guard who took the reins when Peterson was sidelined has played too submissive with Peterson back in the lineup. Flory Bidunga can’t seem to get a quality touch in the post anymore.
And Peterson himself is shooting just 36% over the last seven games. KU is 3-4 in its last seven.
Mizzou seemed to have some pretty good things rolling but has become overly dependent on the one thing still rolling now: Mark Mitchell. The rest of the Tigers’ supporting cast has disappeared in March.
Over an eight-game stretch from from mid-January to mid-February, KU was the sixth-best team in the country, per Bart Torvik metrics. The five teams ranked above KU over that stretch: eventual No. 1 seed Florida, No. 1 seed Duke, No. 1 seed Michigan, No. 1 seed Arizona and No. 2 seed Houston. The selection committee ranked those five teams as its top five on Sunday. KU was better than the rest of the field for nearly five weeks.
In the month of February, Mizzou was 20th-best team in the country, per Bart Torvik metrics. That’s not top-five, sure, but it’s not exactly 10-seed material, either. Every team ahead of the Tigers received at least a 7 seed in NCAA Tournament.
In other words, both KU and Mizzou have shown there’s something more in there — something better than what they’ve shown recently.
Can they find it again?
We’re back at the original question, and I’ll return the original answer:
Yes, it happens. More often than you might think, actually.
For starters, seven of the past 11 national champions failed to win their conference tournament (though they all won at least one game in the conference tournament, and Mizzou did not), which means they began their NCAA Tournament on the heels of a loss.
But a lot of the Final Four participants — seemingly one almost every year — were struggling more than just the single conference tournament defeat.
• A year ago, Auburn began the season 27-2 but then lost three of four before making a Final Four in the tournament.
• In 2024, Alabama had lost four of six before the Big Dance. And North Carolina State won its conference tournament but had lost four straight games heading into postseason play. Both teams reached the Final Four.
• In 2023, national champion Connecticut started the season 14-0 but then lost its groove and played barely better than .500 basketball — just 11-8 over its last 19.
• In 2021, Final Four participant UCLA took a four-game losing streak into the NCAA Tournament.
That’s five of the past six years. It keeps going, too. Heck, the 2013 Final Four was filled with such examples. Michigan was 6-6 in its last 12; Syracuse had lost five of nine; Wichita State was 7-6 in its last 13 and had lost three of five.
Those teams comprising the list aren’t just over-achievers making a magical run. (I left out, for example, the 8th-seeded UNC team that Kansas beat in the 2022 national championship). Instead. they were teams that had something going early or midway into the year before sputtering into March.
Which is where Kansas and Mizzou sit.
They haven’t shown the same ceiling — KU, as mentioned, went on a run up there with the nation’s best — but they’ve each shown a higher ceiling than they’ve reached recently. The Final Four might not be the baseline or standard for both, but I used the examples to prove the point: You can turn it on when you need to turn it on.
But with all those teams, they had evidence they could do it — the run didn’t come from nowhere, but rather from something they’d figured out earlier in the year.
Kansas has that. Or had that.
Mizzou has played better than this, too.
But for those that have made runs in the past, it wasn’t simply about flipping a switch to start playing well. It was about figuring out why they weren’t. It was about figuring out how to get it back.
There was still time.
Even if very little of it.